Quotes by Andre Breton

About Andre Breton:

André Breton is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Andre Breton

Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from wh...

Andre Breton

Life’s greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.

Andre Breton

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

Andre Breton

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.

Andre Breton

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.

Andre Breton

We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.

Andre Breton

The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.

Andre Breton

They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.

Andre Breton

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

Andre Breton

What is more terrifying-- the things we imagine or the things that are real?

Andre Breton

There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.

Andre Breton

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Andre Breton

I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.

Andre Breton

Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.

Andre Breton

I am the soul in limbo.

Andre Breton

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. 'Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, drive...

Andre Breton

My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.

Andre Breton

No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.

Andre Breton

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

Andre Breton

Author Bio

  • NameAndre Breton
  • DescriptionFrench writer and poet
  • AliasesAndre Breton
  • BornFebruary 18, 1896
  • DiedSeptember 28, 1966
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Novelist