Quote

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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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
Moment
Stops
Monopolize
Moments
Utterly
Hypnotized
Two
Immediate
Constituted
Past
Faculty
Cloudy
Become
Intellectual
Spectacle
Today
Poet
Sensory
World
Clear
Faculties
Future
Detached
Precipitate

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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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The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
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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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The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
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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.
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There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
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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.
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What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
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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.
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...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
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When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
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I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Dada is a state of mind.
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Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
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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.
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To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.
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Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.
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