Quotes from Salvador Dali

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

Let my enemies devour each other

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

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

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

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.

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.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath

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 Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

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.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

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

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.

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

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

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.

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.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

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

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

God invented man, and man invented the metric system.