Quotes by Salvador Dali
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Salvador Dali. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Salvador Dali
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquess of Dalí de Púbol (Catalan: [səlβəˈðo ðəˈli]; Spanish: [salβaˈðoɾ ðaˈli]; 11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.
Born in Figueres, Catalonia, Dalí received his formal education in fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by Impressionism and the Renaissance masters from a young age, he became increasingly attracted to Cubism and avant-garde movements. He moved closer to Surrealism in the late 1920s and joined the Surrealist group in 1929, soon becoming one of its leading exponents. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings. Dalí lived in France throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) before leaving for the United States in 1940 where he achieved commercial success. He returned to Spain in 1948 where he announced his return to the Catholic faith and developed his "nuclear mysticism" style, based on his interest in classicism, mysticism and recent scientific developments.
Dalí's artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design and photography, at times in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays and criticism. Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork. His public support for the Francoist regime, his commercial activities and the quality and authenticity of some of his late works have also been controversial. His life and work were an important influence on other Surrealists, pop art and contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
There are two major museums devoted to Salvador Dalí's work: the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.
The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.
Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.
Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.
New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.
The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.
If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!
The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali.
Photographic data... is still and essentially the safest poetic medium and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.
Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.
Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy -- the joy of being Salvador Dalí -- and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?
My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
― Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
The difference between false memories and true ones is the
same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the
most real, the most brilliant.
We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
