Quotes from Andre Breton

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

For me, the single word "God" suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.

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

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.

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.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.

Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat—what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen.

There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.

La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.

This cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are,' while others, which well might be, 'are not.

speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise.

There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others — this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence …

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.

La poésie se fait dans un lit comme l'amour Ses draps défaits sont l'aurore des choses (English) Poetry is made in bed like love Its unmade sheets are the dawn of things

Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.

It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.

What's the good of these great fragile fits of enthusiasm, these jaded jumps of joys? We know nothing anymore, but the dead stars; we gaze at their faces; and we gasp with pleasure. Our mouths are dry as the lost beaches, and our eyes turn aimlessly and without hope. Now all that remain are these cafés where we meet to drink these cool drinks, these diluted spirits, and the tables are stickier than the pavements where our shadows of the day before have fallen.

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory.

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.

The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams.