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Salvador Dalí

85 quotes

“'Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“- There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“- Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born.. .All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where is the real? All appearance are deceitful, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand.. .It is nerves, muscles, bones. Let us go deeper: it is molecules and acids. Further still: it is an impalpable waltz of electrons and neutrons. Further still: an immaterial nebula. Who can prove that my hand exists?”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time.. .I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros.. ..NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me 'maître', I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Le Surréalisme, c'est moi.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in Salvador Dali : Master of Surrealism and Modern Art (1971) by George Cevasco, p. 13
“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from People, 27 September 1976
“Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards.. .To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in an interview, published in 'Playboy', 1976
“The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality.. .I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 17
“Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.. ..life.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face.. ..My eyes were popping out of my head.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 42
“Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 113
“I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema.. .I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning'!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview conducted by Paloma Chamorro in Madrid (Spain), 1982; cited in Salvador Dalí: a la conquista de lo irracional, Javier Pérez Andújar (2003) p. 245 as "Yo no tomo drogas, yo soy la droga." ("I don't take d…
“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.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1987) by Pierre Cabanne, in a preface written by Dalí in January 1968 and translated by Albert Field, p. 13
“When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity..”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote, early January 1986, in: 'El País, Dalí vuelve a casa', 17 July 1986: as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small, Roger Rothman, 2012 UNP-Nebraska.
“The Italian metaphysical movement [initiated by De Chirico ] started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch. The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality. Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even believe in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from Dali's 'Introduction' of the exhibition of drawings, made by Lorca, 1930's (MPC 3); as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland,…
“It is under such cultural circumstances that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanicism and the architecture of auto-punition, by psychological bureaucratic congratulations, by ideological disorder and imaginative fasting, by affective paternal hungers of all kinds, seek in vain - to bite into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial hack of some hitlerian nurse, in order at last to be able, no matter how, to communicate with the totemic consecrated host that has just been elevated in front of their own noses and which, as is known and understood, was nothing else than the spiritual and symbolic nourishment that catholicism offered during the centuries to appease the cannibal frenzy of moral and irrational hungers.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from: Dalí's essay, 1935: Conquest of the Irrational - Chapter: The Waters in which we Swim; Julien Levi Publisher, New York, 1935. p. 8
“The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity". Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:,br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc., all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having reached the surface [in the Paris' Metro] I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement.. .And, a miracle!.. .This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one's soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 210
“Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me.. .I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities.. .Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge.. .Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the cratinization of advertising.. .Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It's from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance.. ..but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can't be in God.. .In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dali's comment on the 'Woman-paintings', c. 1960 [a.o. Woman-III ] of the American abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: (MPC 75); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Sc…
“I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'. In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational.. .The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations.. .Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of my erotic-emotional life.”
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from the catalog of the exhibition 'Dali una vida de libro', Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004