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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
Mirrors
Role
Capacity
Roles
Open
Passive
Eye
Reflect
Limited
Mirror

More quotes by 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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The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
Andre Breton
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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.
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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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
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It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.
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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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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No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
Andre Breton
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Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
Andre Breton
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It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
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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The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
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 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
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Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
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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I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.
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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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