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Quote by Andre Breton

“To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.”

Quote by Andre Breton

Author

Andre Breton was a French writer and a key figure in the Surrealist movement. Born on February 19, 1896, in Nantes, France, he passed away on September 28, 1966. Breton is renowned for his contributions to Surrealism, which had a profound impact on 20th-century literature and art. more

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“Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.”

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Author:Andre Breton

“In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.”

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“To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.”

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Author:Andre Breton

“There is nothing with which it is so dangerous to take liberties as liberty itself.”

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Author:Andre Breton

“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

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“Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. Do not forget to make proper arrangements for your last will and testament: speaking personally, I ask that I be taken to the cemetery in a moving van. May my friends destroy every last copy of the printing of the Speech concerning the Modicum of Reality.”

“Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.”

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Book:Findings and keepings: analects for an autobiography

Source: Findings and keepings: analects for an autobiography

“Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.”

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Book:Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s

Source: Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s

“Safety razors make it hard to grow beards in America: America would be a better place if there were a few bearded, savage, terrible old men.”

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“By putting business before every other manifestation of life, our mechanical and financial civilization has forgotten the chief business of life: namely, growth, reproduction, development. It pays infinite attention to the incubator-and it forgets the egg!”

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Book:Findings and keepings: analects for an autobiography

Source: Findings and keepings: analects for an autobiography