André Breton quotes

André Breton was a French writer and poet, recognized as the founder and principal theorist of Surrealism. His manifestos and works greatly influenced 20th-century literature and art by emphasizing the power of the unconscious mind. He inspired generations of artists to push the boundaries of reality and creativity. Here are 73 of his quotes:

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself. (André Breton)
Words make love with one another. View quote
André Breton
All my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. View quote
André Breton
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing. View quote
André Breton
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. View quote
André Breton
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject. View quote
André Breton
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. View quote
André Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist. View quote
André Breton
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality. View quote
André Breton
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. View quote
André Breton
Pure psychic automatism, by which one seeks to express, be it verbally, in writing, or in any other manner, (is) the real working of the mind. Dictated by the unconsciousness, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and free from aesthetic or moral preoccupations. (André Breton)
Under his [ Marc Chagall ] sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting. View quote
André Breton
The imaginary is what tends to become real. View quote
André Breton
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. View quote
André Breton
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself. View quote
André Breton
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere. View quote
André Breton
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness. View quote
André Breton
May night continue to fall upon the orchestra. View quote
André Breton
I am the soul in limbo. View quote
André Breton
Life's greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose. View quote
André Breton
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. (André Breton)
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. View quote
André Breton
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable. View quote
André Breton
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. View quote
André Breton
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. View quote
André Breton