Salvador Dalí quote: “Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From…”

“The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

“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 (1904–1989) Spanish artist

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

“This life takes a lot more courage than I ever gave it credit for. When I was growing up around here I was always fantasizing heroic shit without realizing that what was shaping up was going to be the greatest heroic adventure of them all: trying to live and be a decent human being. That shit takes more courage than I ever had.”

Junot Díaz (1968) Dominican-American writer

Profile in Playboy magazine (August 2013) http://www.playboy.com/articles/junot-diaz-brief-history

“One of the most considerable achievements of Surrealism was its discovery that many writers and painters of the past had been Surrealists without knowing it.”

Henri Peyre (1901–1988) American linguist

As quoted in Cohn Existentialism (1948), p. 36

“…there is a striking similarity in the surrealist and abstract painters attitude to the object; both have a horror of it in its proper context.”

John Piper (artist) (1903–1992) English painter and printmaker (1903-1992)

Lost, A valuable object, in Myfanwy Piper's anthology-"The Painters Object" 1937

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“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 (1904–1989) Spanish artist

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

“Of what I am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and object. My own being is this tie, I am at once the subject knowing, and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 50
The Vocation of Man (1800), Knowledge

“I want to know if the people are in the shit and I want to take the people out of the shit in which they are.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945) Brazilian politician, 35th president of Brazil

– during a speech in São Luís, the capital of the Brazilian state of Maranhão. After recognizing he cursed, he stated: "Of course I cursed. Tomorrow, commentators of the major newspapers will say that Lula cursed, but I'm aware that they curse more than I do everyday, and I'm aware of how the poor people of this country live.
"Quero tirar o povo da merda", diz Lula; watch http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/videocasts/ult10038u664689.shtml, at folha.uol.com, 10.12.2009

“One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn't know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?... Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

on his painting 'La Joconde aux Clés'
Quote from La vie fait de l'Oeuvre de Fernand Léger, Dora Vallier, 'Cahiers d'Art', 2, 1954, p. 153
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

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