34 Quotes by Tristan Tzara

Dada covers things with an artificial tenderness. It is snowing butterflies that have escaped from a prophet's head.

Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.

We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written.

When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.

I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles.

Art needs an operation

Always destroy what is in you.

Let us try for once not to be right.