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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

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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
Must
Definitions
Artistic
Remain
Circumstances
Especially
Imagination
Intoxicating
Free
Fidelity
History
Definition

More quotes by Andre Breton

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It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.
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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 approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.
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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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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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At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
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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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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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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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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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Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
Andre Breton
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Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
Andre Breton
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Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
Andre Breton
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...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
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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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.
Andre Breton
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The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.
Andre Breton
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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Andre Breton
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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
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Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought.
Andre Breton