Quotes from Jean Dubuffet

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves and unless one travels to completely new territories one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

Normal means lack of imagination and creativity.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.

But the ultimate question is, Do the eyes receive other things than what the mind projects on them; aren't they really mirrors reflecting the mind's emissions? Perhaps we live in a world invented by ourselves.

La belleza es pura secreción de la cultura como los cálculos lo son del riñón

L'art ne vient pas coucher dans les lits qu'on a faits pour lui ; il se sauve aussitôt qu'on prononce son nom »

Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of.

Mud, rubbish and dirt are man's companions all his life; shouldn't they be precious to him, and isn't one doing man's service to remind him of their beauty?

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action.

I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.

The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible.

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.

Art should be born from the materials.

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium!

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.