Quote collection
38 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present."
"The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."
"We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
"To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been."
"Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange."
"Each thing we see hides something else we want to see."
"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!"
"People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images."
"Nothing is confused except the mind."
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
"If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised."
"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."
"The purpose of art is mystery."
"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well."
"I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people."
"Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible."
"The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb."
"The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery."
"A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows"