Salvador Dali Quotes

I shall be so brief that I have already finished.

Happy is he who causes a scandal

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Do not be afraid of perfection - you will never attain it.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

Everything that is contradictory creates life

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die.

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.

Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.

Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us

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.

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault.

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments

God invented man, and man invented the metric system.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

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.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali

There is one thing more exasperating than a spouse who can cook and won't, and that's a spouse who can't cook and will. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not 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.

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

I do not believe in my death.

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

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.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dali.

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

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.

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.

Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

God is just another artist, like me.

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!

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.