192 Quotes About Surrealism

"I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration."

"What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real."

"Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself."

"As Peret asserts, the value of such stories resides in the fact that they respond to direct social necessity but in a way that is not obvious in a society dominated by what is utilitarian and functional. Rather they represent a natural surplus of imaginative abundance that may confound or reinforce the way we perceive the world, but which never does so in a simple way. Even though they may have no direct social use, they nonetheless embody the actual state of real relations between people."

"Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws."

"Fantasmagoria by Stewart StaffordDreams are the exploration,Of unlimited imagination,In minds so freely open,The chooser becomes chosen,To dream labour's leisure,Overflowing with hidden treasure,And seeing what we feel,The imagined becomes real.© Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved."

"A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them."

"Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!"

"The shifting sands of the world... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'."