Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Shall
Hear
Means
Everything
Stands
Nothing
Recognize
Mean
Perception
Continue
Awareness

More quotes by Andre Breton

Image
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.
Andre Breton
Image
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
Image
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Andre Breton
Image
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
Andre Breton
Image
Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.
Andre Breton
Image
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
Andre Breton
Image
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
Andre Breton
Image
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.
Andre Breton
Image
For me, the single word God suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
Andre Breton
Image
Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
Andre Breton
Image
I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green
Andre Breton
Image
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.
Andre Breton
Image
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
Andre Breton
Image
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.
Andre Breton
Image
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Andre Breton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Andre Breton
Image
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.
Andre Breton