Quotes by Andre Breton

“The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”

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

“Words make love with one another.”

“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.”

“I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.”

“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.”

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”

“Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Natures chief masterpiece is writing well.”

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

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

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

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

“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”

“The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

“We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead mans passing.”