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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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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
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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.
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No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
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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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Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.
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Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
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The imaginary is what tends to become real.
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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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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
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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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What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
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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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We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
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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 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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Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
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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.
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The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
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A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.
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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