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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.

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
Roles
Open
Passive
Eye
Reflect
Limited
Mirror
Mirrors
Role
Capacity

More quotes by Andre Breton

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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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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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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.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
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.
Andre Breton
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A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.
Andre Breton
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The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
Andre Breton
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The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Andre Breton
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There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
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.
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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...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
Andre Breton
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The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
Andre Breton
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Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
Andre Breton
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If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
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The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
Andre Breton
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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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What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
Andre Breton
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Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.
Andre Breton