155 Quotes by André Breton

The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.(Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.)

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Un mot et tout est perdu, un mot et tout est sauvé.

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express ― verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner ― the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

The Word is more, and, for the cabalists, it is nothing less, for example, than that in the image of which the human soul is created; we know that it has been traced back to the point of being the initial example of the cause of causes; it is, therefore, as much in what we fear as in what we write, as in what we love

All I have left is a transparent body inside of which transparent doves hurl themselves on a transparent dagger held by a transparent hand.

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.