Surrealism Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old surrealism quotes, surrealism sayings, and surrealism proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts. Andre Breton
Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real. Lorrie Moore
Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end. Henry Miller
Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois. Susan Sontag
The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream. Graham Joyce
The key to surrealism is to create something apparently disparate and irrational that at the end has more sense than the objective world. Cisco Jimenez
Refusing to idealize, the Surrealists awakened a sensitivity to the arbitrary and the unusual.  Sidra Stich
Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare. Salvador Dali
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. Andre Breton
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. Andre Breton
Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums. Salvador Dali
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. Octavio Paz
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been. Rene Magritte
Surrealism is based on the belief in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought. Andre Breton
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings. Octavio Paz
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. Salvador Dali
The objective of surrealism is to make use of the dream, which will open the way to the great mystery of life in the cause of his own art. Nathalia Brodskaia
Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts. Frida Kahlo
Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself. Michael Richardson
Surrealism, which fizzled as an autonomous doctrine, as a specific method, does not exist. But it remains an historical fact, a fire that illuminates the intellectual landscape of the horizon. Paul Nouge
Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life. Brad Holland
If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept. Andre Breton
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip. Susan Sontag
It is a little bit surreal to know that you are in your own little spaceship, and a few inches from you is instant death. Scott Kelly
In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. Milton Glaser
The stress in surrealism is always upon life and thought, not on literature or technique. To a surrealist everything is dictated by the place which art has in life. Art would lose its function if it were separated from the problems of everyday living. Silvano Levy
Surrealism is born of a consciousness of the derisory condition allotted to the individual and his thought, and a refusal to accommodate oneself to it. Jean-Louis Bedouin
Surrealism sought to maintain its autonomy and the right to continue its own particular investigations into ways of changing consciousness, the role of the unconscious within the social body, and the current state of language both visual and verbal. Dawn Ades
Surrealism was a perception of reality over which reason was denied the opportunity to exercise confining restrictions. John Herbert Matthews