Salvador Dali quotes:

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.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

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.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

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.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

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.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

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.

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

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

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

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

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.

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 connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

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.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health.However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?"Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.

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

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

God invented man, and man invented the metric system.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

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.

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties...

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

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. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

Let my enemies devour each other.

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

[My art is] capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world.'

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.

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

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

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

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

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

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.

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

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?

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

Everything that is contradictory creates life

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.

Forever will be you and me.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

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

Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

God is just another artist, like me.

Happy is he who causes a scandal

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

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

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

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

I do not believe in my death.

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

I don't need drugs. I am drugs.

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

I shall be so brief that I have already finished

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.

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

I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

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.

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!

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

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

It is either easy or impossible.

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures

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.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

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

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

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.

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

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

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

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

Qui sait déguster ne boit plus jamais de vin, mais goûte des secrets

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

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

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

So little of what could happen does happen.

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

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

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.

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