Quotes by Breton, Andre

"No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily."

Breton, Andre on enlightenment
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"Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads."

Breton, Andre on escapism   

"In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again."

Breton, Andre on events   

"No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist."

Breton, Andre on example   

"It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere."

Breton, Andre on existence   

"To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!"

Breton, Andre on god   

"Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession."

Breton, Andre on greed   

"To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be."

Breton, Andre on imagination   

"There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself."

Breton, Andre on liberty   

"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."

Breton, Andre on art   

"If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable."

Breton, Andre on love
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"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

Breton, Andre on mind   

"To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize."

Breton, Andre on war   

"The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations."

Breton, Andre on public   

"What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find."

Breton, Andre on secrets   

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."

Breton, Andre on beauty
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"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."

Breton, Andre on understanding