Salvador Dali Quotations

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

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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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

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

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

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

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

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

There is one thing more exasperating than a spouse who can cook and won't, and that's a spouse who can't cook and will. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

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.

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

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

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

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

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

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

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

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

Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

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

Let my enemies devour each other.

It is either easy or impossible.

Qui sait déguster ne boit plus jamais de vin, mais goûte des secrets

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

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.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.

You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!

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

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

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

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

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

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

Happy is he who causes a scandal

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

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

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

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.

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

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

Forever will be you and me.

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

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

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

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.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

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

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

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

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

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

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

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.

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

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

So little of what could happen does happen.

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.

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

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

I do not believe in my death.

The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind.

Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.

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

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously.