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To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything.

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
Nothing
Mean
Recognize
Hear
Means
Everything

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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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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Words make love with one another.
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 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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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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Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
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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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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Dada is a state of mind.
Andre Breton
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Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.
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 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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Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
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 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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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 simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
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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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