Quotes from Salvador Dali

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

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!

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

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.

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...

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

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.

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

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.

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

Mi locura es sagrada, no la toquen.

El amor, dije yo, se parecía extrañamente a ciertas sensaciones gástricas de los primeros síntomas del mareo, que producían una inquietud y estremecimientos tan delicados que uno no estaba seguro de si estaba enamorado o iba a vomitar.

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

Que hablen de uno, aunque sea bien

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.

I am the Don Quixote of unreality.

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.

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

La gente debería verse más como sus retratos y menos como en la vida real

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.

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

The true painter must be able, before an infinite panorama, to limit himself to reproducing a single ant.