I leave you the best phrases of Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Spanish painter, sculptor and writer born in 1904 and died in 1989, considered one of the most prominent representatives of surrealism. His works include The Persistence of Memory or The Elephants.
You may also be interested in these quotes about art or these from great painters.
-A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
-I don't take drugs. I am a drug.
-The only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad.
-Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.
-The thermometer of success is simply the envy of the discontented.
-To be interesting, one has to provoke.
-Those who do not want to imitate anything do not produce anything.
-Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity.
-What matters is sowing confusion, not eliminating it.
-Geniuses must never die, the progress of humanity depends on us.
-There's only one difference between me and a madman. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I'm crazy.
-The genius has to go over madness and madness over genius.
-I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die.
-I think life should be a continuous party.
-Every morning when I wake up, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí.
-Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
-I'm not strange. I'm just not normal.
-There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
-Don't fear perfection, you will never achieve it.
-A great wine requires a madman to make the vine grow, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to do it, and a lover to drink it.
-At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven he wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
-I believe that the moment is near when, through an active and paranoid method of thought, it is possible to systematize the confusion and contribute to the total discredit of the world of reality.
-You have to systematically create confusion, so creativity is released. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
-One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have baptized as 'reality' is an illusion even greater than the world of dreams.
-Surrealism is destructive, but it only destroys what it considers to be chains that limit our vision.
-Give me two hours a day of activity, and I will follow the other twenty-two in my dreams.
-The fact that I do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they do not make sense.
-It's easy or impossible.
-Let my enemies devour each other.
-It is not necessary for the public to know if I am joking or if I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know.
-The errors are almost always of a sacred character. Never try to correct them. On the contrary, rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After this, it will be possible to sublimate them.
-The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
-Start by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do what you like; everyone will respect you.
-New skin, a new land! And a land of freedom, if that's possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.
-Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.
-I am doing things that inspire me with deep emotion and I am trying to paint honestly.
-Happy is the one who causes a scandal.
-Don't worry about being modern. Unfortunately it is the only thing that, whatever you do, cannot be helped.
-Painting is an infinitely tiny part of my personality.
-Picasso is a painter, like me; Picasso is Spanish, like me; Picasso is a communist, I am not.
-The true painter must be able to have, with the most unusual things, the most unusual ideas.
-Just as it amazes me that a bank clerk never eats a check, I am also surprised that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.
-People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
-When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is no doubt that he is in error.
-It will always be you and me.
-Drawing is the honesty of art.
-And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.
-I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and the laws of things, in order to have them in my power.
-The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic feelings.
-The difference between false and true memories is the same as for jewelry: it is always false the one that seems more real, the brightest.
-The connoisseur does not drink wine, but knows its secrets.
-Life is too short to go unnoticed.
-It is good taste and only good taste, which has the power to sterilize and is always the first obstacle to any creative operation.
-Wars have never hurt anyone, except people who die.
-Democratic societies are not suitable for the publication of thunderous revelations like the ones I have the habit of making.
-Take me, I'm the drug; Take me, I'm the hallucinogen
-The drawing is the honesty of the technique. There is no possibility of cheating. Is good or bad.
-Beauty must be edible, or nothing at all.
-The two biggest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) being Spanish, (2) being called Dalí.
-If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than genius.
-Man cannot change or escape from time. The eye sees the present and the future.
-Very little of what could happen happens.
-I believe that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes it, without having the need to work.
-There comes a time in the life of every person in which he realizes that he adores me.
-Someone like me, who pretends to be a true madman, living and organized with Pythagorean precision…
-We must always remember that the Chinese Revolution was not a peasant revolution, but of the extreme right.
-Dalí was a Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.
-Every morning when I get up, I experience an exquisite joy, the joy of being Salvador Dalí, and I wonder in ecstasy: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to do today?
-If I'm going to be more than average, if someone is going to remember me, then I have to go further, in art, in life, in everything!
- All my knowledge of both, science and religion, I incorporate them in the classical tradition of my paintings.
-The reason that some portraits do not look true to life is that some people do not make any effort to look like their images.
-There are only two bad things that can happen to you in life, being Pablo Picasso or not being Salvador Dalí.
-I'm never alone. I have the habit of always being with Salvador Dalí. Trust me, that's a permanent party.
-I will be a genius, and the world will admire me. Maybe I will be despised and misunderstood, but I will be a genius, a great genius, because I am sure of it.
-This great tragedy that we call modern art.
-The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it.
-We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.
-God is just another artist, like me.
-I am going to be so brief that I have finished.
-Fond of money as I like it, is nothing less than mystical. Money is a glory.
-Many people do not turn eighty because they try for too long to stay in their forties.
-Cannibalism is one of the most obvious manifestations of tenderness.
-It's funny, I am much more interested in talking or being in contact with people who think the opposite of what I think, than those who think the same as I think.
-That people talk about Dalí, even if it's for the better.
-The clown is not me, but this society so monstrously cynical and unconsciously naive that it plays a serious role to disguise its madness.
-Each of the two halves is exactly linked to the other half, in the same way that Gala was linked to me… Everything opens and closes and interrelates with precision.
-While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in the other.
-I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything, show me others. Or let me shut up.
-A painting is a photograph made by hand.
-An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who does not have hair under her arms.
-The secret of my influence has always been that I keep it a secret.
-It is better to have loved and lost than to have to wash twenty kilos of clothes a week.
-Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind that can be perceived through the power of dreams and nightmares.
-Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
-I don't understand why, when I order a grilled lobster in a restaurant, they have never served me a cooked phone.
-When I paint, the sea roars. While others just splash in a bathtub.
-The only thing the world will never get enough of is scandal.
-To have respect in society, it is good to have talent to give a kick in the right shin to the society you love. After that, be a snob.
-My mother once told me that children were like knives. They don't do it on purpose, but they cut you. And we still cling to them, right? We hold them until the blood flows
-Instead of stubbornly trying to use surrealism for subversion, it is necessary to try to make surrealism something solid, complete and classic.
-An unpredictable, faithful and objective threat seems to have chosen my life in a systematic way to make the incidents without violent, phenomenal and memorable incidents.
-Regulsion is the sentinel who guards the door of everything we most desire.
-Dalí is a magnificent painter, but in real life he is an incredible clown- usually more interesting for everyone.
-If you understand your painting before it is finished, then it is better not to finish it.
-Before entering prison, I was nervous and anxious. He did not know whether he should paint or perhaps make a poem, go to the movies or go to the theater.
-People put me in jail, and my life became divine. Magnificent!.
-I was never an average student. He seemed refractory to any teaching and seemed like he could be really silly or that he could surprise with amazing work.
-To awaken my fervor, it was necessary to offer me something that I liked. Once my appetite returned, I became really hungry.
-The famous squishy watches are nothing more than the tender, extravagant, lonely and paranoid-critical Camembert of time and space.
-Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow my mustache - it's better for your health.
-I always carry with me a cigarette case adorned with jewels where, instead of tobacco, there are small mustaches in the Adolphe Menjou style. I offer them but nobody dares to take one.
-Progressive art can help people learn, not only about the objective forces of society, but also about the social character of their inner life.
-There is only one thing more exasperating than a wife who knows how to cook but does not do it, and that would be a wife who does not know how to cook but does it.
-What is television for the man who just by closing his eyes can see places accessible to the eye and the never seen before?
-Youth needs difficulties to get things. If you get some money for this, some money for that, everything becomes mediocre and collapses.
-I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was always by my side while I wrote it, who became the fairy of my balance, who brought the salamanders out of my doubts.
-The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and his death are essentially different from those of the rest of humanity.
- Without a doubt, I place Freud together with the heroes. He stripped the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all Heroes: Moses.
-One might think that through ecstasy we enter a world far from reality and dreams. The disgusting become desirable, the affection cruel, the ugly beautiful, etc.
-It is obvious when my enemies, my friends and the public in general pretend not to understand the meaning of the images that arise and that I transcribe in my paintings.
-Surrealism served as a demonstration that total sterility and attempts at automation have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system.
-Since the French Revolution a vicious and cretinous tendency has developed to consider a genius as a human being equal in every way to others.
-I categorically refuse to consider that surrealism is another literary artistic group. I believe that they were able to free man from the tyranny of the "practical and rational" world.
-Where is the real thing? All appearance is fallacious, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand. They are nerves, muscles, bones. Let's dig deeper: it's molecules and acids.
-I am surrealism.
-The pleasure of the flesh can only be satisfied if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality is.
-I need all these sudden images that appear to me from my past and that form the factory of what my whole life is.
-I am able to project myself in my little internal cinema. I free myself through a secret exit from attempts to besiege my own soul.
-Every time I lose a little sperm I am totally convinced that I have wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards… Since I'm not that helpless to begin with.
-The murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming «memories of our conscience», we pray, heaven opens, and the angels say: «Good morning!
- Today, the taste for the defect is such that only imperfections and especially ugliness seem great. When a Venus looks like a toad, contemporary pseudo aesthetes exclaim: It is strong, it is human!
- I think that I am a better writer than a painter, and in this I agreed with my father. The important thing about my writing is not the style, nor the syntax, nor the discursive resources. The important thing about my writing is simply what I say, and the day will come when that will be accepted.
-The true painter is one who is capable of painting extraordinary scenes in the middle of an empty desert. The true painter is one who is able to patiently paint a pear surrounded by the tumults of history.
-Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudí's Gothic architecture, my love for gold… there is a common denominator in all of this: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all paths lead to the same revelation: we are the children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of humanity.
-I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous minstrel Federico García Lorca (the Spanish surrealist poet). It was very painful.
-Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. The accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically is sublimated in the artwork.