André Breton was a popular leader in the Surrealist movement bringing new ideas about art to New York in the 1940s.
He worked in different types of media including collage and printmaking and wrote several books.
His innovative ways of combining text and images influenced many New York artists.
Breton believed that art could be used as an anti-war protest a concept that regained importance during World War II.
Some of his famous works include “Egg in the church or The Snake”, “Poeme” and “The African Mask.”
His ideas and works continue to influence artists today.
Let’s have a look at some of the best quotes by Andre Breton.
Top 10 Andre Breton Quotes
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself. ~ André Breton.
I am the soul in limbo. ~ André Breton.
The imaginary is what tends to become real. ~ André Breton.
Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us… ~ André Breton.
Beauty will be convulsive or not at all. ~ André Breton.
Every time you date someone with an issue that you have to work to ignore, you’re settling. ~ André Breton.
Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale. ~ André Breton.
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. ~ André Breton.
Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur. ~ André Breton.
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state. ~ André Breton.
Famous Andre Breton Quotes
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. ~ André Breton.
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot. ~ André Breton.
I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys. ~ André Breton.
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again. ~ André Breton.
I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green. ~ André Breton.
The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood. ~ André Breton.
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. ~ Andre 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. ~ André Breton.
Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are. ~ André Breton.
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find. ~ André Breton.
The imaginary is that which tends to become real. ~ André Breton.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. ~ André Breton.
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. ~ André Breton.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random. ~ 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. ~ André Breton.
Quotes by Andre Breton
A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it… ~ André Breton.
The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams. ~ André Breton.
May night continue to fall upon the orchestra. ~ André Breton.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself – is not earned by work. ~ André Breton.
The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up. ~ André Breton.
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought. ~ André Breton.
It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and why my first concern is then to know what it looks out on. ~ André Breton.
There’s only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era. ~ André Breton.
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. ~ André Breton.
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily. ~ André Breton.
Quotes about Andre Breton
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well. ~ André Breton.
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject. ~ André Breton.
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt.’ ~ André Breton.
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise. ~ André Breton.
Words make love with one another. ~ André Breton.
It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself. ~ André Breton.
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere. ~ André Breton.
They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish. ~ 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. ~ André Breton.
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist. ~ André Breton.
The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb. ~ André Breton.
It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today’s blind architecture – a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside! ~ André Breton.
When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas? ~ André Breton.
Popular Andre Breton Quotes
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. ~ André Breton.
We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man’s passing. ~ André Breton.
It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms. ~ André Breton.
The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. ~ 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. ~ André Breton.
Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere. ~ Andre Breton.
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real. ~ André Breton.
Let us not mince words.. the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful. ~ Andre Breton.
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself. ~ 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. ~ André Breton.
Best Andre Breton Quotes
Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history. ~ André Breton.
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose. ~ André Breton.
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 whatever point he chooses, along any other pat save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can. ~ André Breton.
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession. ~ André Breton.
The imaginary is what tends to become real. ~ André Breton.
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession. ~ 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. ~ André Breton.
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. ~ André Breton.
So these were the 70 famous quotes about Andre Breton.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Ansel Adams quotes and Billie Eilish quotes.
