“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
— Salvador Dalí
“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”
“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”
“I am not strange. I am just not normal.”
“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”
“There is only one difference between a madman and myself. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”
“So little of what could happen does happen.”
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
“What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
“Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.”
“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”
“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.”
“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. ”
“I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.”
“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
“It is either easy or impossible.”
“Life is too short to remain unnoticed.”
“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.”
“Let my enemies devour each other.”
“To be interesting, one has to provoke.”
“Everything that is contradictory creates life.”
“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”
“I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”
“If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!”
“God is just another artist, like me.”
“The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.”
“Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”
“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.”
“There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realise they adore me.”
“Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.”
“An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”
“All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.”
“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
“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.”
“If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”
“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”
“The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.”
“For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.”
“Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.”
“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.”
“Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future.”
“Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius.”
“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”
“Right now I’m the greatest. I don’t say this through vanity. It’s just that the rest are so bad.”
“The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets.”
“Drawing is the honesty of the art.”
“Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.”
“Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.”
“I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”
“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”
“Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality...”
“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”
“Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.”
“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.”
“Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.”
“I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.”
“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”
“I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.”
“The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.”
“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.”
“Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.”
“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.”
“When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.”
“Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead.”
“God invented man, and man invented the metric system.”
“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”
“The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”
“When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath.”
“Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.”
“The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.”
“Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us.”
“Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!”
“I do not believe in my death.”
“Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”
“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”
“Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”
“And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.”
“Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.”
“Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.”
“The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.”
“Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!”
“It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”
“Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
“New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.”
“Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.”
“There is one thing more exasperating than a spouse who can cook and won’t, and that’s a spouse who can’t cook and will. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
“Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.”
“Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.”
“We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.”
“Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”
“Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure.”
“The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.”
“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
“Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.”
“The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.”
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