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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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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
Mind
Certain
Drugs
Believe
Doe
Creates
Men
States
Push
Revolts
Like
Reason
Acts
Frightful
Need
Whenever
Surrealism
Needs
Allow
Forsake
Much
Drug
Devote
Every
State
Revolt

More quotes by Andre Breton

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The imaginary is what tends to become real.
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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
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Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
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Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
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I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green
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Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
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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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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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Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
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At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.
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Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
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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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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.
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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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Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
Andre Breton