Salvador Dalí Quotes (1904-1989)

“The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.”

“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”

“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”

“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face.. .My eyes were popping out of my head.”

“I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of meterotic-emotional life.”

“I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the “conquest of the irrational.” In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.”

“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”

“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”

“I wanted my illustrations for the Dante to be like the faint markings of moisture in a divine cheese. This explains their variegated aspect of butterflies' wings. Mysticism is cheese; Christ is cheese, better still, mountains of cheese!”

“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”

“Let us watch this de Kooning [Dali comment here the 'Woman' paintings, Willem de Kooning painted in the early 1950's] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of 'The Eternal Feminine' should appear.. ..the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up.”

“Dali has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiaccritical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis.”

“What a wonderful thing it is for an artist [Dali] to find exactly the right wife [Gala] for him. This must only happen once in a hundred times only. It has happened to Dali and I think it is going to make the entire difference to his career - in fact all the difference between him remaining an interesting phenomenon of a distorted decade or in him becoming one of the two or three leading figures of the coming age.”

“I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate.”

“The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.”

“Surprisingly, Dalí said that his soft watches [in his painting 'The Persistence of Memory', 1931 were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The painter insisted on this explanation in his reply letter to Prigogine, who took it as Dalí's reaction to Einstein's coldly mathematical theory.”