Great Throughts Treasury

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."

"An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better."

"At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."

"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."

"Between ourselves, it's terrible what one lays oneself open to when drawing an innocent picture."

"I cannot paint until I have the complete picture in my mind."

"I do not like money, either for itself or for what it can buy, since I want nothing we know about."

"I leave to others the business of causing anxiety and terror and mixing everything up."

"I, for my part, have come to grips with the fact that I will lead a rather unglamorous existence to the very end."

"I have found a new potential inherent in things -- their ability to gradually become something else. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances."

"If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but thinking of the question that has been raised. The mind sees in two different senses: (1) sees, as with the eyes; and (2) sees a question (no eyes)."

"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."

"In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape."

"Life obliges me to do something, so I paint."

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

"My art is only valid insofar as it resists bourgeois ideology, in the name of which life is extinguished."

"Nothing is confused except the mind."

"Our secret desire is for a change in the order of things."

"One night, I woke up in a room in which a cage with a bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage, instead of the vanished bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock which I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects -- the cage and the egg -- to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated."

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

"The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb."

"There are some men here on earth who know what true intellectual honesty is and who want no part of this inertia nor expect any help from it. The countless others are indifferent, passive, clumsy calculators, or dishonest. Their number is not enough to make them right."

"The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

"The extraordinary miracle of art is that it is intuitive with no objective."

"The Surreal is but reality that has not been disconnected from its mystery."

"To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been."

"This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power poetry"

"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."

"You have no responsibility other than to realize your real desires, to satisfy them, and to delight in doing so"

"We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all."