Top 100 Salvador Dalí Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”

— Salvador Dalí

52. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

53. “Right now I’m the greatest. I don’t say this through vanity. It’s just that the rest are so bad.”

— Salvador Dalí

54. “Drawing is the honesty of the art.”

— Salvador Dalí

55. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

56. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

57. “The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.”

— Salvador Dalí

58. “God invented man, and man invented the metric system.”

— Salvador Dalí

59. “Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.”

— Salvador Dalí

60. “Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.”

— Salvador Dalí

61. “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”

— Salvador Dalí

62. “I do not believe in my death.”

— Salvador Dalí

63. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

64. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

65. “We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.”

— Salvador Dalí

66. “Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.”

— Salvador Dalí

67. “I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.”

— Salvador Dalí

68. “Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”

— Salvador Dalí

69. “Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.”

— Salvador Dalí

70. “The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”

— Salvador Dalí

71. “Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us.”

— Salvador Dalí

72. “Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality...”

— Salvador Dalí

73. “Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.”

— Salvador Dalí

74. “The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.”

— Salvador Dalí

75. “I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.”

— Salvador Dalí

76. “The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”

— Salvador Dalí

77. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

78. “When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath.”

— Salvador Dalí

79. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

80. “Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!”

— Salvador Dalí

81. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

82. “It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”

— Salvador Dalí

83. “Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!”

— Salvador Dalí

84. “We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.”

— Salvador Dalí

85. “Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.”

— Salvador Dalí

86. “And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.”

— Salvador Dalí

87. “Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”

— Salvador Dalí

88. “The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.”

— Salvador Dalí

89. “Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.”

— Salvador Dalí

90. “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”

— Salvador Dalí

91. “Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.”

— Salvador Dalí

92. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

93. “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.”

— Salvador Dalí

94. “Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.”

— Salvador Dalí

95. “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”

— Salvador Dalí

96. “Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure.”

— Salvador Dalí

97. “The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.”

— Salvador Dalí

98. “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”

— Salvador Dalí

99. “Forever will be you and me.”

— Salvador Dalí

100. “Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.”

— Salvador Dalí