Salvador Dali Quotes

Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.

I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

Photographic data ... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

So little of what could happen does happen.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves ... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

I do not believe in my death.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

The difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist.

God is just another artist, like me.

The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad.

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something ... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.

Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later ... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.

Forever will be you and me.

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.

Happy is he who causes a scandal

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

God invented man, and man invented the metric system.

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties ...

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.

I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?

Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead

Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision ...

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

I don't need drugs. I am drugs.

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her ... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments

I believe that the moment is near when
by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health.
However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?"
Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.

I never took drugs, because I am drugs

I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know more about Raphael than all of you altogether.

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.