“The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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André Breton70

French writer 1896–1966

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“Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=baKRHNX7eo0C&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false
from: Point du Jour (Break of Day; 1934)
Breton's quote is often misquoted as The man who can't visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
after 1930

“Time’s horses gallop down the lessening hill.”

Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) British writer

Time flies.

“Damn everything but the circus!… The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“294. A Man may lead his Horse to Water, but cannot make him drink.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“A man may well bring a horse to the water,
But he cannot make him drinke without he will.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: A man may well bring a horse to the water,
But he cannot make him drinke without he will.

“A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Ein Mensch wie ich kann ohne Steckenpferd, ohne herrschende Leidenschaften, ohne einen Tyrannen in Schillers Worten, nicht leben. Ich habe meinen Tyrannen gefunden und in seinem Dienst kenne ich kein Maß.
Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (1895), as quoted in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Vol 3-4 (1967) p. 159
1890s
Context: A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.