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.

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.

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

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

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!

Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later ... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.

God is just another artist, like me.

The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

God invented man, and man invented the metric system.

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.

I don't need drugs. I am drugs.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality...

Everything that is contradictory creates life

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

I shall be so brief that I have already finished

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead

Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.

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 this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.

[My art is] capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world.'

I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties...

[I am a] contradictory and paradoxical man.

Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision ...

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being.

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

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.

I will be sof brief, I have already finished.

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

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.

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.

I do not believe in my death.

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

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

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

So little of what could happen does happen.

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

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

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.

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

I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

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

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

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

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

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets

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

Life is too short to remain unnoticed

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!

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

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.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius

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.

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

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

Forever will be you and me.