18 quotes
Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.
Breton's novel Nadja (1928)
Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand; the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)
Under his [ Marc Chagall ] sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)
La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.
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.
[T]his cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things 'are' while others, which well might be, 'are not'.
Apollinaire asserted that Chirico's first paintings were done under the influence of kinesthetic disorders (migraines, colic, etc.)
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)
Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express, be it verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, (is) the real working of the mind. Dictated by the unconsciousness, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and free from aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
Eyes exist in the savage state.
Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1926)
Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."
Love is always before you. Love.
Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (1926)
Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. There remains madness, 'the madness that one locks up', as it has aptly been described. That madness or another..
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)
Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past.
La Clé des Champs (1953)
I was asked to make a report on the Italian situation to this special committee of the 'gas cell', which made it clear to me that I was to stick to the statistical facts (steel production etc.) and above all not to get involved with ideology. I couldn't do it.
Poetry worthy of its name is measured by the degree of abstention, of refusal, it implies, and that negative component of its nature must be maintained as essential: it balks at tolerating anything already seen, heard, agreed upon, at using anything already used except when diverting it from its previous function.
A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: ‘THE POET IS WORKING’.
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (1924)