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Salvador Dalí Quotes
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Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol , known professionally as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish surrealist artist of Catalan ethnicity born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.

✵ 11. May 1904 – 23. January 1989   •   Other names Salvator Dalí
Salvador Dalí photo
Salvador Dalí: 117   quotes 31   likes

Salvador Dalí Quotes

“Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision..”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 17

“Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born... All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 131-132 - (VSD), Dali's quotes on the void

Sleep , Heart

“July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect.”

Salvador Dalí

DG p. 59
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

“September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 59 – 64

Way

“I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning!”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Angels , Courage

“Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 42

“I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 5-6

Learning , Patience

“Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards... To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote in an interview, published in 'Playboy', 1976
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980

Feeling , Time

“There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

Lying

“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote in 'Le phénomene de l'extase', in 'Minotaure' 1933; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

World , Beauty , Dreams , Thinking

“You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Life , People , Girl , Boy

“My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.... as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject.”

Salvador Dalí

The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject.
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 12

World , Imagination , Communication , Reality

“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting , Sea

“Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational.”

Salvador Dalí

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

“My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. 12

Imagination , Game , Dead

“the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne.”

Salvador Dalí

DG p. 60
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.”

Salvador Dalí

Dali's quote, 1945; as cited by R. Descharnes (1985), in Salvador Dalí. Abrams. p. 94. ISBN 0-8109-0830-1
Dali just finished his second painting 'Basket of Bread, 1945'
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Faith , History , Study , Painting

“And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 65 (Dali's remark, in 1952)

“Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Money , People

“Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me... I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities... Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge... Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the cratinization of advertising... Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It's from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance.... but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can't be in God... In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from (MPC 3); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 167
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

God , World , Nature , Reality

“Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.... objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11).... The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote, 1920's; MPC p. 13; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 28
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting

“This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 11 - in: the 'Prologue' of The Diary of a Genius

Life , Death , Books , Sleep

“.. 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.”

Salvador Dalí

as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 42
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali

Communication , Sun , Painting

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 1

Sense

“Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964)

Life , Childhood

“The Italian metaphysical movement [initiated by De Chirico ] started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch. The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality. Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even believe in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from Dali's 'Introduction' of the exhibition of drawings, made by Lorca, 1930's (MPC 3); as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 152
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

Reality

“Where is the real? All appearance are deceitful, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand... It is nerves, muscles, bones. Let us go deeper: it is molecules and acids. Further still: it is an impalpable waltz of electrons and neutrons. Further still: an immaterial nebula. Who can prove that my hand exists?”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 133-134 - (VSD)

Appearance

“It seems to me perfectly obvious when my enemies, my friends and the public in general pretend not to understand the meaning of the images that arise arid that I transcribe in my pictures, How can you expect then to understand them when I myself, who am their "maker", understand them as little?”

Salvador Dalí

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

Understanding

“Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.”

Salvador Dalí

title of his oil-painting, Dali painted in 1950
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Age , Dogs , Girl , Sleep

“Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational... The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations... Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 23 - on new Surrealism techniques and methods.

Dreams , Way , Memory , Hurt

“It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity". Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.”

Salvador Dalí

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

Knowledge

“It is under such cultural circumstances that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanicism and the architecture of auto-punition, by psychological bureaucratic congratulations, by ideological disorder and imaginative fasting, by affective paternal hungers of all kinds, seek in vain - to bite into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial hack of some hitlerian nurse, in order at last to be able, no matter how, to communicate with the totemic consecrated host that has just been elevated in front of their own noses and which, as is known and understood, was nothing else than the spiritual and symbolic nourishment that catholicism offered during the centuries to appease the cannibal frenzy of moral and irrational hungers.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from from: Dalí's essay, 1935: Conquest of the Irrational https://ia601209.us.archive.org/4/items/DaliConquestIrrational/412994-Dali_ReducedPDF.pdf - Chapter: 'The Waters in which we Swim; Julien Levi Publisher, New York, 1935. p. 8
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

Hunger , Imagination , Communication

“It ['The Great Masturbator', 1929] represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster's belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote from La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 648
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Painting

“Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me 'maître', I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum.”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 189 - Prologue

People

“But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.”

Salvador Dalí

as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 17
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali

Life , Nature , Personality

“I am Surrealism.”

Salvador Dalí

Le Surréalisme, c'est moi.
Quote in Salvador Dali : Master of Surrealism and Modern Art (1971) by George Cevasco, p. 13
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980

“Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency... Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.”

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

Time , Men

“So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.”

Salvador Dalí

Quote, early 1930's; as quoted by Jonathan Jones in his article 'André in wonderland'; The Guardian / Culture, 16 June, 2004 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2004/jun/16/1
In the early 1930's Dalí was judged by a surrealist 'high court' at André Breton's flat; Dali was accused of 'counter-revolutionary actions' because of his supposed political sympathy for fascism. Dalí claimed that he was being an honest and pure surrealist, recording the unexpurgated contents of his psychic life - which this quote should illustrate.
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Wealth , Dreams , Painting

“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.”

Salvador Dalí

In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 9

Fight , World

“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929.”

Salvador Dalí

By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.
Dali's quote, 1945; as cited by R. Descharnes (1985), in Salvador Dalí. Abrams. p. 94. ISBN 0-8109-0830-1
Dali just finished his second painting 'Basket of Bread, 1945'
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Faith , Painting

“It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity."”

Salvador Dalí

Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 15

“Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective..”

Salvador Dalí

Quote in Dali's letter to his art-friend Lorca, 1927; as quoted in Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Robin Adèle Greeley, p. 67
Dali is striving then for a rational approach of his paintings; he is very probably referring to his painting, he made earlier in 1927: ' Little Ashes' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Little_Ashes.jpg
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting , Smile , Beauty , Grass

“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream.”

Salvador Dalí

The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.
Quote in 'Le phénomene de l'extase', in 'Minotaure' 1933; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940

Dreams , World , Reality , Thinking

“Don't be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!”

Salvador Dalí

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 44

Perfection

“Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.”

Salvador Dalí

as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 113
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali

Fear

“In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive.”

Salvador Dalí

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Beauty , People