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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.

-Andre Breton

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The Approval Of The

Andre Breton

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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.

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The Clouds Were Disappearing Rapidly, Leaving The Stars To Die. The Night Dried Up.

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It Is Impossible For Me To Envisage A Picture As Being Other Than A Window, And Why My First Concern Is Then To Know What It Looks Out On.

I Find It Impossible To Think Of A Picture Save As A Window, And My First Concern About A Window Is To Find Out What It Looks Out On... And There Is Nothing I Love So Much As Something Which Stretches Away From Me Out Of Sight.

No Rules Exist, And Examples Are Simply Life-savers Answering The Appeals Of Rules Making Vain Attempts To Exist.

Words Make Love With One Another.

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May Night Continue To Fall Upon The Orchestra

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I Insist On Knowing The Names, On Being Interested Only In Books Left Ajar, Like Doors; I Will Not Go Looking For Keys.

Life’s Greatest Gift Is The Freedom It Leaves You To Step Out Of It Whenever You Choose.

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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.

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.

I Myself Shall Continue Living In My Glass House Where You Can Always See Who Comes To Call, Where Everything Hanging From The The Ceiling And On The Walls Stays Where It Is As If By Magic, Where I Sleep Nights In A Glass Bed, Under Glass Sheets, Where Who I Am Will Sooner Or Later Appear Etched By A Diamond.

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If I Place Love Above Everything, It Is Because For Me It Is The Most Desperate, The Most Despairing State Of Affairs Imaginable.

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The Imaginary Is What Tends To Become Real.

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Surrealism Will Usher You Into Death, Which Is A Secret Society. It Will Glove Your Hand, Burying Therein The Profound M With Which The Word Memory Begins.

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At The Word Witch, We Imagine The Horrible Old Crones From Macbeth. But The Cruel Trials Witches Suffered Teach Us The Opposite. Many Perished Precisely Because They Were Young And Beautiful.

How I Loathe The Servitude People Try To Hold Up To Me As Being So Valuable. I Pity The Man Who Is Condemned To It, Who Cannot Generally Escape It, But It Is Not The Burden Of His Labor That Disposes Me In His Favor, It Is - It Can Only Be - The Vigor Of His Protest Against It.

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Trust In The Inexhaustible Character Of The Murmur.

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Words Have Finished Flirting. Now They Are Making Love.

There Is By My Leaning Over The Precipice Of Your Presence And Your Absence In Hopeless Fusion My Finding The Secret Of Loving You Always For The First Time

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.

My Wish Is That You May Be Loved To The Point Of Madness.

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.

Humor (is) The Process That Allows One To Brush Reality Aside When It Gets Too Distressing.

Over And Above The Various Prejudices I Acknowledge, The Affinities I Feel, The Attractions I Succumb To, The Events Which Occur To Me And To Me Alone- Over And Above A Sum Of Movements I Am Conscious Of Making, Of Emotions I Alone Experience- I Strive, In Relation To Other Men, To Discover The Nature, If Not The Necessity, Of My Difference From Them. Is It Not Precisely To The Degree I Become Conscious Of This Difference That I Shall Recognize What I Alone Have Been Put On This Earth To Do, What Unique Message I Alone May Bear, So That I Alone Can Answer For Its Fate?

There Is Nothing With Which It Is So Dangerous To Take Liberties As Liberty Itself.

To See, To Hear, Means Nothing. To Recognize (or Not To Recognize) Means Everything.

Of All Those Arts In Which The Wise Excel, Nature's Chief Masterpiece Is Writing Well.

Dada Is A State Of Mind.

Under His (marc Chagall, Ed.) Sole Impulse Metaphor Made Its Triumphal Entry Into Modern Painting.

Surrealism, N. Pure Psychic Automatism, By Which It Is Intended To Express, Whether Verbally Or In Writing, Or In Any Other Way, The Real Process Of Thought. Thought's Dictation, Free From Any Control By The Reason, Independent Of Any Aesthetic Or Moral Preoccupation.

Beauty Is Like A Train That Ceaselessly Roars Out Of The Gare De Lyon And Which I Know Will Never Leave, Which Has Not Left. It Consists Of Jolts And Shocks, Many Of Which Do Not Have Much Importance, But Which We Know Are Destined To Produce One Shock, Which Does...the Human Heart, Beautiful As A Seismograph...beauty Will Be Convulsive Or Will Not Be At All.

Nothing That Surrounds Us Is Object, All Is Subject.

When Will The Arbitrary Be Granted The Place It Deserves In The Formation Of Works And Ideas?

It Will In The End, Be Admitted That Everything, In Effect Is An Image And That The Least Object Which Has No Symbolic Role Assigned To It Is Capable Of Standing For Absolutely Anything.

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.

Surrealism Will Usher You Into Death, Which Is A Secret Society. It Will Glove Your Hand, Burying Therein The Profound M With Which The Word Memory Begins. Do Not Forget To Make Proper Arrangements For Your Last Will And Testament: Speaking Personally, I Ask That I Be Taken To The Cemetery In A Moving Van. May My Friends Destroy Every Last Copy Of The Printing Of The Speech Concerning The Modicum Of Reality.

We All Love Conflagrations. When The Sky Changes Color, It Is A Dead Man's Passing.

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!

Objects Seen In Dreams Should Be Manufactured And Put On Sale.

A Work Of Art Has Value Only If Tremors Of The Future Run Through It.

Let Us Not Mince Words: The Marvelous Is Always Beautiful, Anything Marvelous Is Beautiful, In Fact Only The Marvelous Is Beautiful.

Past And Future Monopolize The Poet’s Sensory And Intellectual Faculties, Detached From The Immediate Spectacle. These Two Philtres Become Utterly Clear The Moment One Stops Being Hypnotized By The Cloudy Precipitate Constituted By The World Of Today.

The Art Of Frida Kahlo Is A Ribbon Around A Bomb.

I Believe In The Future Resolution Of These Two States, Dream And Reality, Which Are Seemingly So Contradictory, Into A Kind Of Absolute Reality, A Surreality, If One May So Speak.

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