54 Surrealism Quotes To Inspire

Surrealism, an artistic and literary movement, has captivated imaginations for nearly a century. Rooted in the fascination with the subconscious and the dream-like states of the mind, it challenges conventional perceptions of reality. Artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte have left us with images that float between the uncanny and the spectacular, while writers such as André Breton have penned words that unsettle and inspire. In this collection, you'll find 54 surrealism quotes that delve into the depths of human creativity, pushing boundaries and inviting you to see the world through a lens of wonder and thought-provoking beauty.

1. “Exit, pursued by a bear.” - William Shakespeare

2. “L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire” - André Breton

3. “Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all” - Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

4. “Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.” - Michael Richardson

5. “We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.” - André Breton

6. “How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise.” - André Breton

7. “I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss.” - Joe Bousquet

8. “Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.” - Joe Bousquet

9. “An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassed the existence of the slightest human echo.” - Joe Bousquet

10. “May night continue to fall upon the orchestra” - André Breton

11. “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. ” - Joan Miro

12. “Once she called to invite me to a concert of Liszt piano concertos. The soloist was a famous South American pianist. I cleared my schedule and went with her to the concert hall at Ueno Park. The performance was brilliant. The soloist's technique was outstanding, the music both delicate and deep, and the pianist's heated emotions were there for all to feel. Still, even with my eyes closed, the music didn't sweep me away. A thin curtain stood between myself and pianist, and no matter how much I might try, I couldn't get to the other side. When I told Shimamoto this after the concert, she agreed."But what was wrong with the performance?" she asked. "I thought it was wonderful.""Don't you remember?" I said. "The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can't get into the music!"Shimamoto laughed. "I wouldn't exactly call that art appreciation.""This has nothing to do with art. Let a bald vulture eat that up, for all I care. I don't care what anybody says; I like that scratch!""Maybe you're right," she admitted. "But what's this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?"In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. "The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They're completely different.""You're a strange one!" She laughed. And there in the train seat, ever so slightly, she moved her shoulder to touch mine. The one and only time in the past two months our bodies touched.” - Haruki Murakami

13. “As Peret asserts, the value of such stories resides in the fact that they respond to direct social necessity but in a way that is not obvious in a society dominated by what is utilitarian and functional. Rather they represent a natural surplus of imaginative abundance that may confound or reinforce the way we perceive the world, but which never does so in a simple way. Even though they may have no direct social use, they nonetheless embody the actual state of real relations between people.” - Michael Richardson

14. “A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it.” - Michael Richardson

15. “There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.” - André Breton

16. “What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.” - André Breton

17. “Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.” - André Breton

18. “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” - André Breton

19. “By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.” - Michael Richardson

20. “Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.” - Michael Richardson

21. “Surrealism also refuses the representation of reality: reality can only be; its existence proves its reality. Fiction thereby becomes impossible or is, by definition, false.” - Michael Richardson

22. “In this stillness that is at the same time movement, in this darkness that is at the same time light, change is found not in the realm of ideas but in the energizing desire that is realized through precipitation. Desire tends towards its own realization and change takes place when the desire for it shatters the bounds of the possible, breaking the dialectical equilibrium holding together the framework of what is existent. It is at such moments that the imaginary flows into the real and overwhelms it, inundating it until it has been absorbed.” - Michael Richardson

23. “The shifting sands of the world... show how much the surrealists were drawn towards an interrogation of what reality actually is. Unlike fabulists of whatever hue, there is a materiality in surrealist writing that resolutely keeps it, one might say, 'down to earth'.” - Michael Richardson

24. “The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.” - André Breton

25. “Harton thought that if one squeezed humanity through a wine press, its essence would flow out as drops of policemen.” - Georges Limbour

26. “In the shadows he could just make out a rough, ghostly wall that stood out in the pitch darkness. As if drawn by an irresistible black beacon, he slowly advanced step by step towards that incandescent wall of shale. Far off, the city was vanishing into the air. The fiesta disappeared somewhere beyond his eyelids. The wall was increasing in size, growing amidst a mixture of shadows and sparks. It was a wall of smoke from which sprouted candles that resembled asteroids. In fact, it was not one wall but two. Two tall, crackling walls, silently burning. But it wasn't two walls either. It was, in fact, a street.” - Eugenio Fernandez Granell

27. “A constant human error: to believe in an end to one's fantasies. Our daydreams are the measure of our unreachable truth. The secret of all things lies in the emptiness of the formula that guard them.” - Floriano Martins

28. “Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.” - Pierre Janet

29. “Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.” - Jyrki Vainonen

30. “I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.” - Arthur Holitscher

31. “Several people toss and turn in their sleep, startled by the lines of the newspapers in their dreams, knives out, lights out, lights out, knives out!” - H.C. Artmann

32. “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” - Marcel Duchamp

33. “Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.” - André Breton

34. “People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.” - Salvador Dali

35. “Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.” - K.J. Bishop

36. “The play takes place on a ramp, hanging from a ramp, below a ramp, and to the sides of a ramp.” - Rosalyn Drexler

37. “He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.” - Curtis Ackie

38. “Ai pus nitroglicerină sub perna lui dumnezeu ...” - Saşa Pană

39. “Cine n-ar dori să moară visând că moare?” - Saşa Pană

40. “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone.” - Salvador Dali

41. “I couldn’t even picture Mavis’s face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.” - James Tate

42. “There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.” - André Breton

43. “Oh incomprehensible pederasts, I shall not heap insults upon your great degradation; I shall not be the one to pour scorn on your infundibuliform anus. It is enough that the shameful and almost incurable maladies which besiege you should bring with them their unfailing punishments.” - Comte de Lautreamont

44. “It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands. Listen well to what I say: turn on your heels and go back, not forward,[...]” - Comte de Lautreamont

45. “Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme” - André Breton

46. “yes, i have dated Salvador Dali guy when i was a high school girl. he was a great lover. but i had to dump him because he stole my inspiration of bent clock*~* .... who cares...” - Hiroko Sakai

47. “That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.” - Amy Reed

48. “Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.” - John Lennon

49. “Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new.” - Salman Rushdie

50. “Neither I nor the four flippers of the sea-bear of the Boreal ocean have been able to solve the riddle of life.” - Lautreamont

51. “As though eavesdropping, the whistling wind refuses to speak above a whisper. The winding road is cut into the side of the mountain in such a way that it seems they are not making any progress; the walk down will require endurance. She looks up at the cluster of clouds which have been pencilled in neatly against the sky, and hopes it doesn’t rain. It occurs rapidly, a geisha brusquely folding shut her fan; the sun sets, and brilliant darkness replaces light.” - Curtis Ackie

52. “La Courbe de tes yeuxLa courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon coeur,Un rond de danse et de douceur,Auréole du temps, berceau nocturne et sûr,Et si je ne sais plus tout ce que j'ai vécuC'est que tes yeux ne m'ont pas toujours vu.Feuilles de jour et mousse de rosée,Roseaux du vent, sourires parfumés,Ailes couvrant le monde de lumière,Bateaux chargés du ciel et de la mer,Chasseurs des bruits et sources des couleurs,Parfums éclos d'une couvée d'auroresQui gît toujours sur la paille des astres,Comme le jour dépend de l'innocenceLe monde entier dépend de tes yeux pursEt tout mon sang coule dans leurs regards.” - Paul Eluard

53. “La terre est bleueLa terre est bleue comme une orangeJamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pasIls ne vous donnent plus à chanterAu tour des baisers de s’entendreLes fous et les amoursElle sa bouche d’allianceTous les secrets tous les souriresEt quels vêtements d’indulgenceÀ la croire toute nue.Les guêpes fleurissent vertL’aube se passe autour du couUn collier de fenêtresDes ailes couvrent les feuillesTu as toutes les joies solairesTout le soleil sur la terreSur les chemins de ta beauté.” - Paul Eluard

54. “[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.” - Jane Mayer