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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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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
Looks
First
Envisage
Picture
Concern
Window
Impossible
Firsts

More quotes by Andre Breton

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The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
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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What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
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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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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The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
Andre Breton
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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
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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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A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.
Andre Breton
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I am the soul in limbo.
Andre Breton
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Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
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
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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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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Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
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.
Andre Breton
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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
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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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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