Quotations by Salvador Dalí

• "P.Halsman: Dalí, what makes you tick?
  Dalí: My hairspring, of course."
  
  
• "P.Halsman: Dalí, why do you wear a mustache?
  Dalí: In order to pass unobserved."
  
  
• "P.Halsman: Dalí, what is surrealism?
  Dalí: Surrealism is myself."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making."
  
  
• "Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."
  
  
• "Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."
  
  
• "God invented man, and man invented the metric system."
  
  
• "Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it."
  
  
• "I believe that the moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality."
  
  
• "I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."
  
  
• "I don't take drugs: I am drugs."
  
  
• "I have Dalínian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."
  
  
• "It is either easy or impossible."
  
  
• "It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "Let my enemies devour each other."
  
  
• "Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism - Money is a glory."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."
  
  
• "Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality..."
  
  
• "So little of what could happen does happen."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "The only difference between myself and a madman, is that I am not mad!"
  
  
• "The only thing that the world will not have enough of is exaggeration."
  
  
• "The reason that some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures."
  
  
• "The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret."
  
  
• "The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture."
  
  
• "The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."
  
  
• "The world will admire me. Perhaps I'll be despised and misunderstood, but I'll be a great genius, I'm certain of it."
  
  
• "There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."
  
  
• "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."
  
  
• "To gaze is to think."
  
  
• "Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die."
  
  
• "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."
  
  
• "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, . . . to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust."
  
  
• "When I was five years old I saw an insect that had been eaten by ants and of which nothing remained except the shell. Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity I look at the sky through flesh."