André Breton

"When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?"

"Surrealism is based on the belief .. in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought."

"The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot."

"It is often repeated that Leonardo da Vinci advised his pupils, searching for a suitable original subject, to stare fixedly at an old, decrepit wall. "Very soon," he said, "you will notice forms and scenes that will become more and more precise.. From then on you will only have to copy what you see and to complete it where necessary." Whatever references continue to be made to this, one can only say that this lesson has been lost. The beautiful interpretive wall, brimming with lizards, is not but a fencepost toppling on the highway, before which a landscape that never has had time to form itself reconstitutes, furthermore, the magic mirror in which life and death may be read.. Let us cast a glance of sincere appreciation on these elementary surfaces in which the future world has for so long elected to compose itself. Coffee grounds, scrap iron, cloudy mirror: it is still of you that the impenetrably bright veils on the hats of young women are made."

"The imaginary is what tends to become real."

"Even the most stable and best poised mind cannot help being fixed, for the moment, on the nightly shrieks of sirens, the dragonlike tongues of flame, which forebode the roar of tanks being hurled against each other. One cannot help being affected in one's inmost being. Nothing will help to obscure the depths, not only of horror but, even more, of the irrational and nonintelligent background upon which, at least for the time being, the intellectual and artistic figures of the mind are traced."

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."

"[Surrealism is] pure psychic automation by which one intends to express verbally, in writing, or by other methods, the real functioning of the mind."