Top 30 René Magritte Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.”

— René Magritte

2. “Nothing is confused except the mind.”

— René Magritte

3. “People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.”

— René Magritte

4. “The purpose of art is mystery.”

— René Magritte

5. “Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.”

— René Magritte

6. “Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”

— René Magritte

7. “We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.”

— René Magritte

8. “If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.”

— René Magritte

9. “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well...”

— René Magritte

10. “Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.”

— René Magritte

11. “The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.”

— René Magritte

12. “I like subversive humor, freckles, women’s knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.”

— René Magritte

13. “To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.”

— René Magritte

14. “Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible – and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.”

— René Magritte

15. “I have few illusions: the cause is lost in advance. As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion.”

— René Magritte

16. “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!”

— René Magritte

17. “A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows.”

— René Magritte

18. “The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.”

— René Magritte

19. “Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.”

— René Magritte

20. “We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.”

— René Magritte

21. “I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.”

— René Magritte

22. “No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better.”

— René Magritte

23. “Those who become entangled in these false ideas are prevented from perceiving the Integral Oneness.”

— René Magritte

24. “Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange.”

— René Magritte

25. “The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.”

— René Magritte

26. “Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities – it is bound up in the series of activities – that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring.”

— René Magritte

27. “Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.”

— René Magritte

28. “A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream.”

— René Magritte

29. “Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.”

— René Magritte

30. “An object never serves the same function as its image – or its name.”

— René Magritte

31. “My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent.”

— René Magritte

32. “I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn’t mean we decide anything.”

— René Magritte

33. “I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books.”

— René Magritte

34. “It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.”

— René Magritte