Salvador Dali Quotes

Do not be afraid of perfection - you will never attain it.

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

I don't need drugs. I am drugs.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.

It is either easy or impossible.

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dali.

I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die.

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.

[My art is] capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world.'

Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision.

Everything that is contradictory creates life

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali

Forever will be you and me.

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali 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 theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!

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 this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

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.

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.

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.