"Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life."
"Surrealism is based on the belief .. in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought."
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André Breton - Manifesto of Surrealism
"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality."
"Knowing how to look is a way of inventing."
"Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men."
"Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them."
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness."
"Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art."
"I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea."
"If we had to obey the decrees laid down by the Surrealist group, there would be virtually no Surrealist photography or even any genuinely Surrealist films, but Surrealism is not a theorem"
"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."
"Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality."
"[the contribution was in their determination] to tap the creative and imaginative forces of the mind at their source in the unconscious and, through the increase in self-knowledge achieved by confronting people by their real nature, to change society."
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Simon Wilson, from preface to Dalí exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, 1980
"Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom and misery."
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Franklin Rosemont, from André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism
"Putting psychic life in the service of revolutionary politics, Surrealism publicly challenged vanguard modernism's insistence on 'art for art's sake.' But Surrealism also battled the social institutions - church, state, and family - that regulate the place of women within patriarchy. In offering some women their first locus for artistic and social resistance, it became the first modernist movement in which a group of women could explore female subjectivity and give form (however tentatively) to a feminine imaginary."
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Whitney Chadwick, from Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation