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

More quotes by Andre Breton

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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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All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
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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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If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.
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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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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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The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
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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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For me, the single word God suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
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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.
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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
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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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My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
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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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Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you're settling.
Andre Breton
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When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
Andre Breton
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The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream, the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.
Andre Breton
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Dada is a state of mind.
Andre Breton
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I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
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