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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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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
Adults
Placed
Find
Realm
Children
Realms
Accommodation
Kind
Ideal
Accommodations
Mind
Absurd
Inhabited
Mysterious
Outlet
Difficulty
Outlets
Ideals
Absurdity

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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.
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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
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The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refused to admit defeat, sets off from watever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.
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We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
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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.'
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There is By my leaning over the precipice Of your presence and your absence in hopeless fusion My finding the secret Of loving you Always for the first time
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The eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror... if it has only the capacity to reflect.
Andre Breton
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The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
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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There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
Andre Breton
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...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
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A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.
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Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
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To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.
Andre Breton