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Salvador Dalí Quotes
1904–1989 Spain
Salvador Dalí (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist, born in Catalonia, Spain. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work and his exceptional way of life and expression.
Also known as: Dali, Salvador, Dalí, Salvador, Salvador Dali, Dali
Random Salvador Dalí quote
47 quotes
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.
If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema.. .I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.
Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.. ..when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations.
Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
- There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency.. .Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.
In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive.
So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.
- September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.
[I]f you want to ensure for yourself a prominent place in Society you must [...] give it a violent kick in the right leg.
Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.
My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh.
But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.
'Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.
Diary of a Genius (1964)
In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.
We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.
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