Top 60 André Breton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.”

— André Breton

Featured in: Relationship Quotes

2. “Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.”

— André Breton

3. “My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.”

— André Breton

4. “Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.”

— André Breton

5. “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”

— André Breton

6. “Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.”

— André Breton

7. “The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.”

— André Breton

8. “It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.”

— André Breton

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

9. “Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.”

— André Breton

10. “Dada is a state of mind.”

— André Breton

11. “Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.”

— André Breton

12. “Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.”

— André Breton

13. “Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”

— André Breton

14. “The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”

— André Breton

15. “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.”

— André Breton

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

16. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”

— André Breton

17. “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.”

— André Breton

18. “I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green.”

— André Breton

19. “The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.”

— André Breton

20. “Words make love with one another.”

— André Breton

21. “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”

— André Breton

22. “The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.”

— André Breton

23. “The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.”

— André Breton

24. “If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.”

— André Breton

25. “May night continue to fall upon the orchestra.”

— André Breton

26. “There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.”

— André Breton

27. “Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you’re settling.”

— André Breton

28. “The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.”

— André Breton

29. “To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery – even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness – is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.”

— André Breton

Featured in: Betrayal Quotes

30. “The imaginary is what tends to become real.”

— André Breton

31. “Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt.’”

— André Breton

32. “I am the soul in limbo.”

— André Breton

33. “Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.”

— André Breton

34. “Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.”

— André Breton

35. “A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it...”

— André Breton

36. “I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.”

— André Breton

37. “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.”

— André Breton

38. “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.”

— André Breton

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

39. “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.”

— André Breton

40. “What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.”

— André Breton

41. “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

42. “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.”

— André Breton

43. “We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man’s passing.”

— André Breton

44. “It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

— André Breton

45. “Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.”

— André Breton

46. “If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.”

— André Breton

47. “I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.”

— André Breton

48. “Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.”

— André Breton

49. “No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.”

— André Breton

50. “Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.”

— André Breton