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Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Andre Breton

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Andre Breton
Age: 70 †
Born: 1896
Born: February 18
Died: 1966
Died: September 28
Art Theorist
Drawer
Essayist
Novelist
Photographer
Poet
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Andre Breton
D'André Breton
Andre Breto
René Dobrant
Convulsive
Beauty

More quotes by Andre Breton

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For me, the single word God suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
Andre Breton
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My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
Andre Breton
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I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word like.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!
Andre Breton
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The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream, the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.
Andre Breton
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I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
Andre Breton
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Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Andre Breton
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Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
Andre Breton
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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
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Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.
Andre Breton
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In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
Andre Breton
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The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
Andre Breton
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There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
Andre Breton