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.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.

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.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.