The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise.
I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.
There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.
The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros's work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
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 could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
The greatest hope, I say, is the one in which all the others are met, is that it is exists for everyone and that for everyone it lasts. That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural hanging bridge cast across life itself.
It was really a star, a star you were heading toward. You can't fail to reach it. Hearing you speak, I felt that nothing would hold you back, nothing, not even me. . . . You could never see this star as I do. You don't understand: It's like the heart of a heartless flower.
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Life's greatest gift is the freedom it leaves you to step out of it whenever you choose.
I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they'd leave me alone.
How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.
The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning-that event which i may not yet have found but on whose path I seek myself- is not earned by work.
If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
This cancer of the mind which consists of thinking all too sadly that certain things ‘are,' while others, which well might be, ‘are not.
The truth can only be seen when you close your eyes to reason and surrender yourself to dreams.
Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
Again begins the ridiculous, terrible waiting, in which we do not know which object to move, which gesture to repeat—what to do in order to make what we are waiting for happen.
It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life.
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Man proposes and dispose. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
There has never been any forbidden fruit. Only temptation is divine. To feel the need to vary the object of this temptation, to replace it by others — this bears witness that one is about to be found unworthy, that one has already doubtless proved unworthy of innocence ...
I will be like Nijinksi, who was taken last year to the Russian ballet, and could not comprehend what spectacle he was viewing. I will be alone, quite alone in myself, indifferent to all the world's ballets.
Words make love with one another.
This is the most beautiful night of all, the lightning filled night: day, compared to it, is night.
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.
Intellectually, true beauty is very difficult to distinguish a priori from the bloom of youth.
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm of my thought.
With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.
There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era.
I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
It's a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it's a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it's a squad of one-less-days that will eventually make up my life.
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows.
