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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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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
Books
Knowing
Names
Looking
Ajar
Left
Insist
Book
Keys
Like
Interested
Doors

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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 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
Andre Breton
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We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
Andre Breton
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Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
Andre Breton
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How I loathe the servitude people try to hold up to me as being so valuable. I pity the man who is condemned to it, who cannot generally escape it, but it is not the burden of his labor that disposes me in his favor, it is - it can only be - the vigor of his protest against it.
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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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.
Andre Breton
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Words make love with one another.
Andre Breton
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Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
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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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.
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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Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
Andre Breton
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Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
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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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
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Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
Andre Breton