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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.

— André Breton La Clé des Champs (1953)

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More quotes by André Breton

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.

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: André Breton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.