I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.
– Andre 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.
– Andre Breton
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
– Andre Breton
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
– Andre 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.
– Andre Breton
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
– Andre Breton
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
– Andre Breton
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
– Andre Breton
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.
– Andre 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.
– Andre Breton
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
– Andre Breton
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
– Andre Breton
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.