Salvador Dali Quotes

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

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

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.

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

God is just another artist, like me.

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

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

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

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me.

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

It is either easy or impossible.

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

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

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

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.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath

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

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

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

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

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

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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

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

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.

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

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.

So little of what could happen does happen.

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.

Happy is he who causes a scandal

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

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

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

I don't need drugs. I am drugs.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

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

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

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

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

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

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

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

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

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

I shall be so brief that I have already finished

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

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

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.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

I do not believe in my death.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

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

Forever will be you and me.

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

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

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

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

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

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

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

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

I never took drugs, because I am drugs

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

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.

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.

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life

Let my enemies devour each other

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

Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.

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

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

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

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

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

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

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

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.

Life is too short to remain unnoticed