Quotes from Andre Breton

Quiero que la gente se calle tan pronto deje de sentir

Je préfère, encore une fois, marcher dans la nuit à me croire celui qui marche dans le jour.

Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

The imaginary is that which tends to become real.

The act of love and the act of poetry Are not compatible With the reading aloud of a newspaper

There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era.

The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine. (Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.)

It was really a star, a star you were heading toward. You can't fail to reach it. Hearing you speak, I felt that nothing would hold you back, nothing, not even me. . . . You could never see this star as I do. You don't understand: It's like the heart of a heartless flower.

It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone

I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.

I have played along with the music just for a second, and now I don't know what to think of suicide, for if I want to separate myself from myself the exit is from this side and, I spitefully add, the entry, the reentry is on the other side.

As I go on my way I may happen to fall from a precipice or be pursued by stones, but each time, I beg you to believe, it's only a reality.

The confidences of the mad, I could pass my whole life inspiring them. They are a scrupulously honest tribe, whose innocence has no peer but my own.

Asimismo, he podido desear ver construir un objeto muy especial que respondiese a una fantasía poética cualquiera.

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a state of need and can push man to frightful revolts.

The Word is more, and, for the cabalists, it is nothing less, for example, than that in the image of which the human soul is created; we know that it has been traced back to the point of being the initial example of the cause of causes; it is, therefore, as much in what we fear as in what we write, as in what we love

It's a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it's a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it's a squad of one­-less-­days that will eventually make up my life.

Time is a tease

Puisque tu existes, comme toi seule sais exister, il n'était peut-être pas très nécessaire que ce livre existât. J'ai cru pouvoir en décider autrement, en souvenir de la conclusion que je voulais lui donner avant de te connaître et que ton irruption dans ma vie n'a pas à mes yeux rendue vaine. Cette conclusion ne prend même son vrai sens et toute sa force qu'à travers toi.

L'Amour, la Poésie, c'est par ce seul ressort que la pensée humaine parviendra à reprendre le large.

All I have left is a transparent body inside of which transparent doves hurl themselves on a transparent dagger held by a transparent hand.

The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. Kill; plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not tolerate deferment. You have no name. Everything is inestimably easy.