Salvador Dalí Quotes (117 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí: 117 quotes 31 likes

Famous Salvador Dalí Quotes

“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.”

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

“A man without ambition is like a bird without wings”

Salvador Dalí

Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/14/wings/

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

“I don't do drugs. I'm drugs.”

Salvador Dalí

In an interview conducted by Paloma Chamorro in Madrid (Spain), 1982; as cited in Salvador Dalí: a la conquista de lo irracional, Javier Pérez Andújar (2003) p. 245
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989
Variant: I don't do drugs. I'm drugs.

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

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí Quotes about painting

“Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 82

“When I paint, the Sea Roars
Others Splash about in the bath”

Salvador Dalí

“In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Wikipedia: The Great Masturbator
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

“It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time... I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros.... NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 171

“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 11-12

“In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 12-13

Salvador Dalí Quotes about life

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

Salvador Dalí

“Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 126 In: L'amour; as quoted in Dali and Me.

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

Salvador Dalí

“We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote, in the 'Introduction' of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 2
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

“The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality... I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. unknown

“The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art”

Salvador Dalí

never written
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 35

Salvador Dalí: Trending quotes

“Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.”

Salvador Dalí

quote of 1953; as cited in Smithsonian magazine.
Variants:
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?
Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí.
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Pleasure

“Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”

Salvador Dalí

Change

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

Salvador Dalí

Law , Understanding

Salvador Dalí Quotes

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

Salvador Dalí

Thinking

“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”

Salvador Dalí

Art

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

Salvador Dalí book The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí - first publication in 1942
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950
Source: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

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

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

Madness

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

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Dali by Dali (1970), as cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2012), p. 737
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970

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

Salvador Dalí

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1987) by Pierre Cabanne
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

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

Salvador Dalí

Jealousy , Success

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small, Roger Rothman, 2012 UNP-Nebraska.
Quotes of Salvador Dali, Miscellaneous

Memory , Falseness

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 12

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

World , Dreams , Reality

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 26

Understanding , Nature

“So little of what could happen does happen.”

Salvador Dalí

“Let my enemies devour each other”

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

Beauty

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

Salvador Dalí

Quote from People, 27 September 1976
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980

Art , Drawing , Cheating

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

Salvador Dalí

Mon Dernier soupir (My Last Sigh, 1983)

Dreams

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

Salvador Dalí

Secret

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

Salvador Dalí

Valentine's Day , Love

“Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”

Salvador Dalí

“Forever will be you and me.”

Salvador Dalí

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

Salvador Dalí

Understanding , Cooking

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Art

“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…”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Hidden Faces

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Love , Youth

“If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 81

Art , Color , Mathematics , Study

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 79

Thinking , Freedom

“Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] 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.”

Salvador Dalí

Dali's comment on the 'Woman-paintings', c. 1960 [a.o. Woman-III ] of the American abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: (MPC 75); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 135
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Dreams , Tear , Appearance , Waiting

“When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis... Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last... It's then that I shall realize my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!”

Salvador Dalí

Quote in 'The Dali News', Dimanche 27 November 1960, Salvador Dali; as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 163-164
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

World , Dreams

“The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth... My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from a review of Dali's exhibition at the Carstairs Gallery; 'The New Yorker', 20 December, 1952 p. 24
Dali is referring to one of his exhibited paintings there, very probably 'The Madonna of Port Lligat'
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

“In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from his Anti-Matter Manifesto', 1958; as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

World

“The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved... In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass... I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from his poem 'Sant Sebastia', Salvador Dali 1927 - dedicated to the Spanish poet Lorca; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 46
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Light , Water , Parting

“In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Dali's lecture, 1951 'Pablo Picasso et moi', (MPC 65)
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Time , Drawing

“Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 16

Chance

“From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Secret Life; as quoted in La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, S. Dali. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 597
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

School , Victory , Summer , Childhood

“Having reached the surface [in the Paris' Metro] I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement... And, a miracle!... This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one's soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 210
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Soul , Appearance , Time

“Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system... Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college”

Salvador Dalí

= collage
Quote from the catalog, 1943, of Dali's exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York; as quoted on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
Dali attacked here some frequently-used Surrealist techniques
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

“When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity..”

Salvador Dalí

Quote, early January 1986, in: 'El País, Dalí vuelve a casa', 17 July 1986: as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
Dali was returned to the Teatro-Museo and on his return he made his last public appearance. He was taken in a wheelchair to a room where press and TV were waiting and made this brief public statement
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

“In the first place, in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!”

Salvador Dalí

inscription, 1950; on the bottom of his studies for the painting 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'; as quotes by Robert Descharnes, Dalí. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003.
Dalí explained his inspiration for the painting 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Dreams , Sense , Universe , Christ

“Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 2

Appearance , Parting

“I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema... I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. unknown

Secret , Soul

“It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:, br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc.,
all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

Dreams , Idea , Question , Problem

“Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation... I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved... If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970

Fools , Parting

“The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 14-15

World , Dreams , Reality

“Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.... life.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. 22

Life , Death

“I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. 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.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 9

World , Fight

“I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light 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 mt erotic-emotional life.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from the catalog of the exhibition 'Dali una vida de libro', Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004
Dali's memory is written in a mixture of French and Catalan accent
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1981 - 1989

Life , Fear , Solitude , Light