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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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I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
Andre Breton
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Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'
Andre Breton
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Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
Andre Breton
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It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
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Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.
Andre Breton
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I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors I will not go looking for keys.
Andre Breton
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If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
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To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.
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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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
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What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
Andre Breton
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Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
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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To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.
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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No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
Andre Breton
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I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.
Andre Breton
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Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Andre Breton
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The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
Andre Breton
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There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
Andre Breton