To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery – even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness – is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.
For me, the single word “God” suggests everything that is slippery, shady, squalid, foul, and grotesque.
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.
Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today’s blind architecture – a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!
I am the soul in limbo.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself – is not earned by work.
It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself.
Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.
A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it...
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt.’
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.