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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.

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
State
Absence
Exercised
Means
Express
Functioning
Thought
Concern
Psychic
Automatism
States
Pure
Psychics
Proposes
Reason
Control
Propose
Verbally
Mean
Written
Aesthetic
Exempt
Moral
Manner
Surrealism
Word
Actual
Dictated

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Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
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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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Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
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It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
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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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All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
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Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.
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The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
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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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Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
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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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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.
Andre Breton
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For me, the single word God suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
Andre Breton
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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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Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
Andre Breton
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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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One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
Andre Breton
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It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
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When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
Andre Breton