Salvador Dali Quotes

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

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

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

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another. ~ Salvador Dali

Wearing Deni's huge vicuna coat with the si cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dali.
He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a little wax moustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said 'One grapefruit...peenk!' and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real or Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Uccello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didn't even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the 'insurgent' 'beats' and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, 'He is more beautiful than M. Brando.'
I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn't stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we can't stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful. ~ Jack Kerouac

If I'm doing a logo, I'll do it in black and white. Once the form is feeling right, only then do I start exploring the color palettes. A good example was the process of rebranding the Salvador Dali Museum. I did at least 100 versions in black and white. ~ David Carson

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

God is just another artist, like me. ~ Salvador Dali

Happy is he who causes a scandal ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me. ~ Salvador Dali

If I had a Salvador Dali painting, I would cuddle it to sleep. ~ Mac Miller

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

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

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. ~ Salvador Dali

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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! ~ Salvador Dali

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

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 ... ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

I was thinking about what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dali. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: You are like a crow, a gothic crow. ~ Patti Smith

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

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

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

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

One thing which I can't stress enough is thaft OCD is completely nonsensical and will not listen to reason. This is one of the most frightening things about having it. I knew that t
o anyone I told, there are Salvador Dali paintings that make more sense. ~ Joe Wells

Sometimes you're quite fortunate, being on the stage, getting to meet people like Salvador Dali. ~ Bryan Ferry

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

Salvador Dali was much too intelligent to be a great painter. And he knew it. ~ Jean-Michel Rene Souche

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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

Forever will be you and me. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt. ~ Tom Robbins

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? ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

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

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 ~ Salvador Dali

I am not strange. I am just not normal. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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! ~ Salvador Dali

When you see Hitler burning paintings by Salvador Dali and Picasso he's telling you that this time period and these men and this culture didn't exist, and I've seen that happen in other countries, Sudan for instance, it's not enough to kill them you have to destroy all of their markings that they left that was their history. ~ George Clooney

I do not believe in my death. ~ Salvador Dali

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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds. ~ Salvador Dali

Precaution the Cuticle of a Grand Piano. Modern art [by Salvador Dali]. ~ Joan Wehlen Morrison

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

Life is too short to remain unnoticed ~ Salvador Dali

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

I never took drugs, because I am drugs ~ Salvador Dali

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

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents. ~ Salvador Dali

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

From 17 to 21, I was obsessed by sport and art. In art, I loved the pre-Raphaelites and Rembrandt first. Then I discovered Salvador Dali, and it was like finding something I already knew. ~ Anthony Browne

Surrealism - in particular with Salvador Dali - was all about ego. It was all about extreme individualism. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

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

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

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.

That was old. Every television station had those shots.

He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

("Into The Water") ~ Simon Kurt Unsworth

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

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! ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. ~ James Thurber

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. ~ Salvador Dali

To be interesting, one has to provoke. ~ Salvador Dali

There's a peculiar porcelain bathtub in a field; almost as though it has been placed there for Salvador Dali to come and capture. ~ Tom Chesshyre

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley. ~ James Thurber

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. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. ~ Salvador Dali

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. ~ Salvador Dali

God invented man, and man invented the metric system. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

I will be sof brief, I have already finished. ~ Salvador Dali

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

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

Ash swirls in the air and the landscape is gray rubble that falls away into the sea. They kept saying global warming wan't going to be the end of us, that it was just threats from the fanatics, that we didn't have to make changes. But every year there were more earthquakes and flood and hurricanes and fires- every element expressing its imbalance. Every year the temperatures soared and the ice melted and no one did anything. My pink house - no longer mine - stands on the edge of nowhere like a rose in a Salvador Dali surrealist desert landscape ... ~ Francesca Lia Block

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

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. ~ Salvador Dali