For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

What has been forgotten is never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless, uncertain, changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].