Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara quotes and aphorisms by the great Romanian avant-garde poet, essayist, performance artist, journalist, critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement.
The magic of a word – Dada – which has brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen, is of no importance to us.
Tristan Tzara
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false.
Tristan Tzara
If you find it futile and don’t want to waste your time on a word that means nothing … The first thought that comes to these people is bacteriological in character: to find its etymological, or at least its historical or psychological origin.
Tristan Tzara
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC to fulminate against 1, 2, 3 to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God.
Tristan Tzara
We see by the papers that the Kru Negroes call the tail of a holy cow Dada. The cube and the mother in a certain district of Italy are called: Dada. A hobby horse, a nurse both in Russian and Rumanian: Dada. Some learned journalists regard it as an art for babies, other holy jesuses calling the little children of our day, as a relapse into a dry and noisy, noisy and monotonous primitivism.
Tristan Tzara
Inability to distinguish between degrees of clarity: to lick the penumbra and float in the big mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured by the scale of eternity, all activity is vain, if we allow thought to engage in an adventure the result of which would be infinitely grotesque and add significantly to our knowledge of human impotence.
Tristan Tzara
When a writer or artist is praised by the newspapers, it is a proof of the intelligibility of his work: wretched lining of a coat for public use; tatters covering brutality, piss contributing to the warmth of an animal brooding vile instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh reproducing with the help of typographical microbes.
Tristan Tzara
Art is a private affair, the artist produces it for himself, an intelligible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment it strikes my fancy to combine this monstrosity with oil paints: a paper tube simulating the metal that is automatically pressed and poured hatred cowardice villainy.
Tristan Tzara
The artist, the poet rejoice at the venom of the masses condensed into a section chief of this industry, he is happy to be insulted: it is a proof of his immutability.
Tristan Tzara
Sensibility is not constructed on the basis of a word; all constructions converge on perfection which is boring, the stagnant idea of a gilded swamp, a relative human product.
Tristan Tzara
A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead; it should be neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark to rejoice or torture the individual by serving him the cakes of sacred aureoles or the sweets of a vaulted race through the atmospheres.
Tristan Tzara
A work of art is never beautiful by decree, objectively and for all. Hence criticism is useless, it exists only subjectively, for each man separately, without the slightest character of universality.
Tristan Tzara
How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: man?
Tristan Tzara
The principle: “love thy neighbor” is a hypocrisy. “Know thyself” is utopian but more acceptable, for it embraces wickedness.
Tristan Tzara
And so Dada was born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity. Those who are with us preserve their freedom. We recognize no theory.
Tristan Tzara
Les cloches sonnent sans raison et nous aussi.
Tristan Tzara
Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries.
Tristan Tzara
Always destroy what is in you.
Tristan Tzara
Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tristan Tzara
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tristan Tzara
Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois?
Tristan Tzara
Rhymes ring with the assonance of the currencies and the inflexion slips along the line of the belly in profile.
Tristan Tzara
Thought is made in the mouth.
Tristan Tzara
Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of man and systematizes the bourgeoisie.
Tristan Tzara
Dada covers things with an artificial tenderness. It is snowing butterflies that have escaped from a prophet’s head.
Tristan Tzara
You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.
Tristan Tzara
I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way.
Tristan Tzara
There is no ultimate Truth.
Tristan Tzara
The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.
Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries
Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.
Tristan Tzara
Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer’s skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.
Tristan Tzara
Thought is made in the mouth.
Tristan Tzara
Art needs an operation.
Tristan Tzara
Morality is the infusion of chocolate into the veins of all men.
Tristan Tzara
The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.
Tristan Tzara
Una obra de arte jamás es bella, por decreto, objetivamente, para todos.
Tristan Tzara
Art is at present the only construction complete unto itself, about which nothing more can be said, it is such richness, vitality, sense, wisdom. Understanding, seeing. Describing a flower: relative poetry more or less paper flower. Seeing.
Tristan Tzara
…We want to make men realize afresh that the one unique fraternity exists in the moment of intensity when the beautiful and life itself are concentrated on the height of a wire rising toward a burst of light, a blue trembling linked to the earth by our magnetic gazes covering the peaks with snow. The miracle. I open my heart to creation.
Tristan Tzara
