“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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression o…" by Salvador Dalí?

Salvador Dalí 117

Spanish artist 1904–1989

Related quotes

“once I falsely hoped to meet the beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

“As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced
Source: Geschichte Meines Lebens

“I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

“A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”

Zadie Smith book Swing Time

Source: Swing Time

“I felt I had nothing more to learn. It was the same thing wrapped up in different packaging again and again. I am not a brilliant dancer at all. But my packaging is great. You know, I have been a hippie all my life. And the dreams of the sixties that I had of living in a commune, of sharing, of never having more than I can use, of living life joyfully in nature -- that was the spirit that was inside me. And in the isolation of being a dancer I thought where is the giving, where is the sharing, with me sitting so far in a cold place? I knew I had to get back and I had to share what life had given me through dance. I was willing to give up my dance and work and beg to realise this dream. Because it would still be my dream, it would still be dance but how much joy it would give so many bodies.”

Protima Bedi (1948–1998) Indian model and dancer

After learning Odissi dance, she toured all over the world performing Odissi dance and then settled in Switzerland but came back to establish a dance school. Quoted in in "I have been a hippie all my life".

“My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person's heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human

“I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way, in subject or treatment.”

Isabel Bishop (1902–1988) American painter

1978 statement, as quoted in The "New Woman" Revised : Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (1992) by Ellen Wiley Todd, Ch. 7, p. 273.
Context: I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way, in subject or treatment. But if I speak in a voice which is my own, it's bound to be the voice of a woman.

“I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 239

“I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.”

James Joyce book Dubliners

Source: Dubliners

“But full emotional and intellectual belief never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Salvador Dalí 117

Related quotes

Related topics