50 Salvador Dali Quotes About Life And Art

Salvador Dali is one of the most celebrated artists of all time - discover 50 of his most famous quotes

07/10/2020 12:00:00h

50 Salvador Dali Quotes About Life And Art | iSTOCK

50 Salvador Dali Quotes

Many adjectives have been used to describe Spanish artist Salvador Dali along the years, from “outrageous “, “iconic “to “madman “and “surreal” but one thing is for certain, the artist and his work are anything but ordinary.

Leader of the Surrealist movement, Dali flabbergasted the entire world with psychedelic creations such as “The Persistence of Memory”, one of the artist’s most recognizable painting, “The Lobster Telephone” a surrealist piece commissioned for the English poet Edward James, or the “Mae West Lips Sofa”, a surrealist sculpture in the form of a sofa.

To keep in tune with his eccentric nature and talent for self – promotion, we have gathered 50 of the most representative Salvador Dali quotes about life, art, love, and mustaches.

1“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”

2“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.”

3“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?”

4“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”

5“An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”

6“What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”

7“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”

8“Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a moustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several moustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Moustache? Moustache? Moustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of moustaches.”

9“The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!”

10“Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic”

11“I am not strange. I am just not normal.”

12“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”

13“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”

14“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.”

15“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.”

16“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.”

17“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.”

18“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.”

19“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”

20“So little of what could happen does happen.”

21“Let my enemies devour each other”

22“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

23“Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”

24“People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”

25“You have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life”

26“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”

27“Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”

28“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.”

29“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”

30“Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”

31“Forever will be you and me.”

32“I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.”

33“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”

34“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.”

35“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.”

36“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 ."

37“The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”

38“I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.”

39“The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”

40“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.”

41“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.”

42“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.”

43“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.”

44“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.”

45“Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.”

46“If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”

47“Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.”

48“I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.”

49“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”

50“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”

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