Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist painter who was known for his strange, dreamlike paintings. He was also a prolific writer, and his quotes are just as strange and surreal as his paintings. Here are some of our Salvador Dalí Quotes.
Salvador Dali was born on May 11th, 1904, in the small town of Figueres, in the Catalonia region of Spain. From an early age, it was clear that Dali was a gifted artist. He began taking painting lessons at the age of nine, and his work was soon being exhibited in Barcelona and Madrid.
In 1926, Dali moved to Paris to study art, and it was there that he first met André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement. Dali quickly became one of the movement’s most prominent members, and his unique, surrealist paintings soon gained him international fame.
Dali died on January 23, 1989, in his hometown of Figueres. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death, Dali was one of the most famous painters in the world. He was known for his surrealist paintings, which often featured strange and bizarre images.
46 Salvador Dalí Quotes
- “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”
2. “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.”
3. “Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”
4. “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.”
5. “I am not strange. I am just not normal.”
6. “Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”
7. “e 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.”
8. “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”
9. “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”
10. “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”
Famous Salvador Dalí Quotes
11. “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.”
12. “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”
13. “Let my enemies devour each other”
14. “Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.”
15. “People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”
16. “There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
17. “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.”
18. “Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.”
19. “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”
20. “Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”
Salvador Dalí Quotes About Life
21. “I absolutely love life.”
22. “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
23. “Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.”
24. “Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”
25. “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
26. “The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”
27. “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.”
28. “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.“
29. “When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.”
30. “The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”
Thought-Provoking Salvador Dalí Quotes
31. “he 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.”
32. “It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
33. “The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”
34. “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
35. “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
36. “Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.”
37. “I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.”
More Salvador Dalí Quotes
38. “The difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist.”
39. “You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life”
40. “It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.”
41. “Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.”
42. “No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy person.”
43. “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.”
44. “If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”
45. “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.”
46. “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.”