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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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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
Stills
Total
Still
According
Nothing
Complete
Insubordination
Make
Rule
Tenet
Save
Surrealism
Afraid
Sabotage
Violence
Expects
Understand
Revolt

More quotes by 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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The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
Andre Breton
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Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
Andre Breton
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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
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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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I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man...is above all the plaything of his memory.
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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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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When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
Andre Breton
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Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
Andre Breton
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The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Andre Breton
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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
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It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
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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Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
Andre Breton
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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.
Andre Breton
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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 see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.
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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It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Andre Breton