French writer & poet (1896-1966)
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence. The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Second Manifesto of Surrealism
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning--that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself--is not earned by work.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Nadja
I am the soul in limbo.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Nadja
The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of re-awaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
ANDRÉ BRETON
What is Surrealism?
It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Nadja
We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from 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.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Nadja
Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a new-born babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Making History: Surrealism and the Invention of a Political Culture
Let us not mince words ... the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Surrealist Manifesto
Eyes exist in the savage state.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Le Surréalisme et la Peinture
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Anthology of Black Humor
Surrealism is only trying to rejoin the most durable traditions of mankind. Among the primitive peoples art always goes beyond what is conventionally and arbitrarily called the 'real'.
ANDRÉ BRETON
introduction, First Papers of Surrealism
Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
ANDRÉ BRETON
First Surrealist Manifesto
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him--which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Anthology of Black Humor
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
ANDRÉ BRETON
The Magnetic Fields
The imaginary is what tends to become real.
ANDRÉ BRETON
Earthlight