Salvador Dali Quotes

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future

Qui sait déguster ne boit plus jamais de vin, mais goûte des secrets

I do not believe in my death.

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.

There is one thing more exasperating than a spouse who can cook and won't, and that's a spouse who can't cook and will. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.

God is just another artist, like me.

Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.

Happy is he who causes a scandal

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

I shall be so brief that I have already finished.

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.

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?

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.

Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.

So little of what could happen does happen.

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.