Salvador Dali

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

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.

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

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.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

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.

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.

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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

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

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.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Let my enemies devour each other.

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

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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

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

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

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

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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

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.