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Salvador Dalí

85 quotes

“Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.. ..objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11).. ..The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, 1920's; MPC p. 13; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 28
“Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective..”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in Dali's letter to his art-friend Lorca, 1927; as quoted in Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Robin Adèle Greeley, p. 67
“The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved.. .In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass.. .I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from his poem 'Sant Sebastia', Salvador Dali 1927 - dedicated to the Spanish poet Lorca; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland,…
“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
“So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, early 1930's; as quoted by Jonathan Jones in his article 'André in wonderland'; The Guardian / Culture, 16 June, 2004
“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in 'Le phénomene de l'extase', in 'Minotaure' 1933; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133
“It seems to me perfectly obvious when my enemies, my friends and the public in general pretend not to understand the meaning of the images that arise arid that I transcribe in my pictures, How can you expect then to understand them when I myself, who am their "maker", understand them as little?”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.. ..as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject. - The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, in the 'Introduction' of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 2
“From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Secret Life; as quoted in La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, S. Dali. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 597
“In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It ['The Great Masturbator', 1929] represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster's belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 648
“What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí - first publication in 1942
“If the secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret, the secret of Gala’s influence has been to remain in turn doubly secret.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí - first publication in 1942
“Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system.. .Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college [= collage].”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from the catalog, 1943, of Dali's exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York; as quoted on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dali's quote, 1945; as cited by R. Descharnes (1985), in Salvador Dalí. Abrams. p. 94. ISBN 0-8109-0830-1
“Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: title of his oil-painting, Dali painted in 1950
“In the first place, in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: inscription, 1950; on the bottom of his studies for the painting 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'; as quotes by Robert Descharnes, Dalí. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003.
“In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Dali's lecture, 1951 'Pablo Picasso et moi', (MPC 65)
“The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth.. .My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from a review of Dali's exhibition at the Carstairs Gallery; 'The New Yorker', 20 December, 1952 p. 24
“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quote of 1953; as cited in Smithsonian magazine. Variants: Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvad…
“[I]f you want to ensure for yourself a prominent place in Society you must [...] give it a violent kick in the right leg.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from his Dalí on Modern Art : The Cuckolds of Antiquated Modern Art , 1957
“In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from his Anti-Matter Manifesto, 1958; as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
“When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis.. .Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last.. .It's then that I shall realize my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in 'The Dali News', Dimanche 27 November 1960, Salvador Dali; as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 163-164
“Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation.. .I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved.. .If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997
“Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency.. .Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997
“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Dali by Dali (1970), as cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2012), p. 737
“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.. ..when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision..”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art [never written].”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect. (DG p. 59)”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“- the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne. (DG p. 60)”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“- September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 65 (Dali's remark, in 1952)
“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 of genius.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is with Millet's 'Angelus' that I associate all the pre-twilight and twilight memories of my childhood, regarding them as the most delirious, in other words (commonly speaking) poetic.. .Most frequently, at the end of summer days, I would leave the streets of the town and go to the fields to listen to the sounds of insects and plunge into infinite reveries.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source