Surrealist quotes and ideas, a complete article about the main aphorisms and definitions of Surrealism and Dadaism by Carl William Brown and the Daimon Club, and always keep well in mind that universe doesn’t even know that you exist, therefore relax, take it easy, don’t worry and support us!
N’en doutez pas, ce sont les ennemmis de l’ordre qui mettent en circulation ce philtre d’absolu. Ils le passent secrètement sous les yeux des gardiens, sous la forme de livres, de poèmes. Le prétext anodin de la littérature leur permet de vous donner à un prix défiant toute concurrence ce ferment mortel duquel il ste grand temps de généraliser l’usage… Achetez, achetez la damnation de votre âme, vous allez enfin vous perdre, voici la machine à chavirer l’esprit. J’annonce au monde ce fait-divers de première grandeur : un nuoveau vice vient de naître, un vertige de plus est donné à l’homme : le surrealisme, fils de la frénésie et de l’hombre. Entrez, entrez, c’est ici que commencent les royaumes de l’instantané.
Louis Aragon, le Paysan de Paris, 1924
Elle s’appelait Sonia, traits orientaux, elle expliqua le chinois en français, plus jolie qu’une beauté onirique, même si elle était peut-être presque réelle, donc je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais quand je l’ai vu, Aurélia, Angélique, Sylvie, Jemmy, Octavie, Isis, Corilla, Émilie, les filles du feu, me sont venus à l’esprit, et j’ai eu l’impression d’être le pauvre Nerval pendu aux barreaux d’une grille!
Carl William Brown
The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
André Breton
The simplest surrealist gesture consists in going out into the street, gun in hand, and taking pot shots at the crowd!
Surrealist Slogan From The 1920S.
Qui est là? Ah très bien, faites entrer l’infini et Carl William Brown aussi!
Louis Aragon
After the Pope I think I am one of the greatest living surrealist writer on the earth.
Carl William Brown
Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
John Lennon
Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.
John Lennon
I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
Salvador Dalí
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
Salvador Dalí
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.
Henry Miller
I was writing Surrealistically in America before I had ever heard the word.
Henry Miller
Surrealism! What is Surrealism? In my opinion, it is above all a reawakening of the poetic idea in art, the reintroduction of the subject but in a very particular sense, that of the strange and illogical.
Paul Delvaux
Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
André Breton
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.
André Breton
The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.
Louis Aragon
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation… A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
Octavio Paz
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
André Breton
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
André Breton
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects — making it possible… to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Susan Sontag
Surrealism is everywhere, but not its true spirit. So I declare that after the Pope we are the real successors of this fantastic, rebellious, anti-conventional and anti-conformist movement!
Carl William Brown and the Daimon Club
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
André Breton
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Susan Sontag
I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
Neil Farber
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.
André Breton
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
André Breton
The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism’s anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
Graham Joyce
I guess Surrealism has a draw for me because it’s an unknown world. It’s a world of subconscious. Some things you can’t really get your hands on very easily. Things that are kind of nebulous and they feel like they’re not completely formed. You have to feel your way through that.
Gotye
Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.
André Breton
But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.
Vincente Minnelli
Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that’s surrealism.
Dong Kingman
I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.
Salvador Dalí
As far as the style, I was fascinated by surrealism.
Mark Mothersbaugh
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.
Susan Sontag
People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
Salvador Dalí
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.
Salvador Dalí
It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
André Breton
Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all
Nikolai Gogol
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.
Angela Carter
To be honest, I wasn’t crazy about the kind of poetry I found in high school English books. I didn’t get really excited about poetry until I discovered Lorca in college. If it wasn’t for surrealism, I’m not sure I’d have become so involved in poetry. I was attracted by the extravagant imagery and elements of fantasy. This was in the ’70s and it seemed to fit the psychedelic mood of the times. I found it liberating.
Elaine Equi
Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were ‘sure’ of finding shirts.
Frida Kahlo
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
André Breton
I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.
Mason Cooley
In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self.
Milton Glaser
I know the new comedy god is surrealism, but it doesn’t touch my heart.
Jenny Eclair
When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean ‘magic’ and they don’t hear ‘realism’, whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It’s both things. It’s not just a fairytale moment. It’s the surrealism that arises out of the real.
Salman Rushdie
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
Rene Magritte
Surrealism runs through the streets.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dalí
My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can’t understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I’m after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments.
Ian Hornak
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
André Breton
In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world – cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there’s the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn’t quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It’s real but not concrete.
Elaine Equi
I’ve always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That’s what I’ve always done.
Jeff Koons
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing… Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice
Greil Marcus
There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Salvador Dalí
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
André Breton
The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.
Graham Joyce
The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it’s the pulp wing of surrealism. That’s the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
China Mieville
My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design].
Philippe Starck
If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.
André Breton
Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!
Salvador Dalí
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.
André Breton
Of all the questions I’m asked, the most difficult is, “How does it feel to be famous?” Since I’m not, that question always catches me with a feeling of surrealism….I’ve got three kids and I’ve changed all their diapers, and when it’s two o’clock in the morning and you’re changing something that’s sort of special delivery with one eye open and one eye shut you don’t feel famous.
Stephen King
Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests.
Dumitru Tepeneag
American art in general… takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.
Rosalind E. Krauss
The surrealism of my pictures was nothing but the real made eerie by vision. I was trying to express reality, for there is nothing more surrealist.
Brassai
I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism – the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht’s alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
Nicholas Royle
Surrealism . . . is the forbidden flame of the proletariat embracing the insurrectional dawn enabling us to rediscover at last the revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers’ councils as a life profoundly adored by those we love.
Manifesto of the Arab Surrealist Movement (1975).
To be a surrealist… means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
René Magritte
Surrealism tried to overcome the stupid and sad banality of our reality to get closer and closer to a possible and cheerful ideality.
Carl William Brown
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
Eugène Ionesco
I have always enjoyed dealing with a slightly surrealistic situation and presenting it in a realistic manner. I’ve always liked fairy tales and myths, magical stories. I think they are somehow closer to the sense of reality one feels today than the equally stylized ‘realistic’ story in which a great deal of selectivity and omission has to occur in order to preserve its ‘realist’ style.
Stanley Kubrick
Dalí was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
Vincente Minnelli
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
André Breton
Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
Lorrie Moore
The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine.’
Regina Spektor
People have the idea that an image must stand for something else, that the real meaning needs to be described with language. Instead it is the image itself that is the meaning.
Mark Ryden
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
André Breton
Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.
Louise Bourgeois
The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.
Daniel Pinkwater
It was an honor to work with Samantha Morton on this Casablanca-esque, silent-film-esque, Americana photobooth Woolworth’s hay day period piece of surrealism/ realism/ story time tell-tale-ism, black and white 35 mm film, washed in strange light, over this love hate tune, heartbreak song, life-goes-on lullaby, The Last Goodbye. It’s a doorway into the future of the fatal past-tense. Get it?
Alison Mosshart
Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.
Octavio Paz
Even as a teenager we got interested in the Beats, Dada, and Surrealism, and so on. What drew us to those was that their lives were their art. It wasn’t something they did separately. Reading biographies of artists of that kind was what was fascinating to me, more than the stuff they made. We became convinced that life and art is really the same thing.
Genesis P-Orridge
MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
Donald Barthelme
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception… as film is able to do today… And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.
Walter Benjamin
When I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.
China Mieville
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
André Breton
On the other hand, Surrealism has been a part of Romanian literature since forever. Even before Tzara, who was originally Romanian, we had Urmuz, who was a surrealist before the term even existed. During Breton’s era too, there was a very active Romanian Surrealist group (Ghérasim Luca, Gellu Naum, etc.) closely related to the French. They had to quit their activities as soon as the Soviet communists took over.
Dumitru Tepeneag
Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.
Patricia Piccinini
The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.
Vincente Minnelli
We didn’t have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you’re young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.
Bradford Cox
I thought that punk in its original state was a revolutionary movement. But like surrealism, it failed in its revolutionary attempt.
Alex Cox
Certainly I enjoy the outré and I enjoy artistic comics and surrealism in comics very much. But the decision I made and have stuck with and refined was the decision to try to be funny and communicate humor. Once you put that ahead of everything else, it resolves those other questions for you.
Michael Kupperman
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a stylistically daring writer in love with surrealism, credited with being ‘the woman who reintroduced hardcore sexuality to Bengali literature’. But though the (male) establishment used this label of erotica to dismiss her work, the sex scenes have exactly the same transgressive function as her use of chronology and narrative voice.
Deborah Smith
Le surréalisme, c’est moi.
Salvador Dali
The Limits Of Control is not surrealism, but it is an experiment in which expectations are deliberately removed: expectations for narrative form, for action in a film, for certain emotional content. We wanted to remove those things and see if we could still make a film that was a beautiful film experience, with deliberately removing things many people would expect.
Jim Jarmusch
That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn’t know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak – and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.
Georg Baselitz
An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.
Cyril Connolly
Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.
Guillaume Apollinaire
After realising my natural affinity towards surrealism several years ago I decided to study it’s origins and definitions.
Trevor Dunn
Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism – the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.
Douglas McCulloh
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.
Salvador Dali
We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man’s passing.
André Breton
The act of killing invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.
Werner Herzog
Surrealism is nothing more than a literary philosophical conception of art and life that tries to overcome the squalid and banal conventions of our stupid existential reality.
Carl William Brown
An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.
Cyril Connolly
Let my enemies devour each other.
Salvador Dalí
This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
I was thinking of the word Surrealistic… I don’t think it should be used exclusively with my photographs. The meaning is close but I think my tendencies are more toward the whimsical or absurd. Surrealism is more connected with morbidity. From that I am very far away.
Eva Fuka
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