Who is Salvador Dali
Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. … It has been said that young Dalí was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates.
Salvador Dali Quotes
1. Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.
2. I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
3. At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
4. Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
5. A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
6. What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.
7. An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.
8. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
9. Since I don’t smoke, I decided to grow a mustache – it is better for the health.
However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: “Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?”
Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.
10. The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!
11. There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
12. Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic
13. I am not strange. I am just not normal.
14. The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
15. The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
16. The difference between false memories and true ones is the
same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the
most real, the most brilliant.
17. One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.
18. It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
19. Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
20. Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.
21. So little of what could happen does happen.
22. Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
23. Let my enemies devour each other
24. You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life
25. Beauty should be edible, or not at all.
26. People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
27. Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
28. The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
29. Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.
30. It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.
31. Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
32. Forever will be you and me.
33. I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.
34. This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
35. What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
36. Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
37. Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul – let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
38. The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.
39. I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.
40. We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
41. The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
42. I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties.
43. In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.
44. New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that “promised land” which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian “planetary notions.” Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the “antediluvian” bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.
45. Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.
46. I believe that the moment is near when
by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
47. My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
48. Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.
49. El amor, dije yo, se parecía extrañamente a ciertas sensaciones gástricas de los primeros síntomas del mareo, que producían una inquietud y estremecimientos tan delicados que uno no estaba seguro de si estaba enamorado o iba a vomitar.
50. Mi locura es sagrada, no la toquen.
51. Que hablen de uno, aunque sea bien
52. My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
53. If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
54. La gente debería verse más como sus retratos y menos como en la vida real
55. Nuestra época se muere de escepticismo moral y nulidad espiritual. La pereza imaginativa, al entregarse al seudoprogreso mecánico, momentáneo y material del período de posguerra, ha desjerarquizado el espíritu. Lo ha desarmado, deshonrado ante la muerte y la eternidad. La civilización mecánica será destruida por la guerra. La máquina está destinada a derrumbarse y enmohecerse, atascada en los campos de batalla, y las jóvenes y enérgicas masas que la construyeron están condenadas a servir de carne de cañón.
56. 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.
57. An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable.
58. Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.
59. When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.
60. I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.
