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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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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
Effect
Least
Image
Ends
Absolutely
Anything
Role
Everything
Standing
Assigned
Capable
Admitted
Objects
Symbolic
Effects
Object

More quotes by Andre Breton

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Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
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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.
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My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
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Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
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Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
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Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.
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The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows
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It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
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We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.
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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.'
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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.
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I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors I will not go looking for keys.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly
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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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.
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