Uncover the enigmatic mind of Salvador Dali with this collection of 116 thought-provoking quotes. Delve into the surreal world of one of the greatest artistic visionaries of all time and gain insight into his unique perspective. From creativity and imagination to life and art, these carefully selected quotes offer a glimpse into Dali’s genius. Immerse yourself in the eccentricity and brilliance of Salvador Dali as you explore his captivating thoughts and ideas.
Salvador Dali Quotes
1- “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.” -Salvador Dali
2- “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.” -Salvador Dali
3- “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.” -Salvador Dali
4- “Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.” -Salvador Dali
5- “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.” -Salvador Dali
6- “The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.” -Salvador Dali
7- “I will be sof brief, I have already finished.” -Salvador Dali
8- “Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure.” -Salvador Dali
9- “Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision…” -Salvador Dali
10- “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.” -Salvador Dali
11- “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…” -Salvador Dali
12- “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.” -Salvador Dali
13- “I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.” -Salvador Dali
14- “Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.” -Salvador Dali
15- “I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.” -Salvador Dali
16- “We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.” -Salvador Dali
17- “I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.” -Salvador Dali
18- “Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.” -Salvador Dali
19- “It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures.” -Salvador Dali
20- “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.” -Salvador Dali
21- “Happy is he who causes a scandal.” -Salvador Dali
22- “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.” -Salvador Dali
23- “Forever will be you and me.” -Salvador Dali
24- “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.” -Salvador Dali
25- “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.” -Salvador Dali
26- “It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.” -Salvador Dali
27- “Drawing is the honesty of the art.” -Salvador Dali
28- “Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.” -Salvador Dali
29- “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.” -Salvador Dali
30- “The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.” -Salvador Dali
31- “Right now I’m the greatest. I don’t say this through vanity. It’s just that the rest are so bad.” -Salvador Dali
32- “Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses.” -Salvador Dali
33- “Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future.” -Salvador Dali
34- “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.” -Salvador Dali
35- “The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets.” -Salvador Dali
36- “Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.” -Salvador Dali
37- “Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius.” -Salvador Dali
38- “And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God.” -Salvador Dali
39- “People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.” -Salvador Dali
40- “The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.” -Salvador Dali
41- “Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.” -Salvador Dali
42- “Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!” -Salvador Dali
43- “All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.” -Salvador Dali
44- “Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us.” -Salvador Dali
45- “If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.” -Salvador Dali
46- “I do not believe in my death.” -Salvador Dali
47- “The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.” -Salvador Dali
48- “The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.” -Salvador Dali
49- “For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.” -Salvador Dali
50- “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.” -Salvador Dali
51- “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.” -Salvador Dali
52- “Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!” -Salvador Dali
53- “There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realise they adore me.” -Salvador Dali
54- “When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath.” -Salvador Dali
55- “You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” -Salvador Dali
56- “The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.” -Salvador Dali
57- “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.” -Salvador Dali
58- “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.” -Salvador Dali
59- “The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.” -Salvador Dali
60- “God invented man, and man invented the metric system.” -Salvador Dali
61- “An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.” -Salvador Dali
62- “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.” -Salvador Dali
63- “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!” -Salvador Dali
64- “Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.” -Salvador Dali
65- “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.” -Salvador Dali
66- “We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.” -Salvador Dali
67- “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.” -Salvador Dali
68- “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.” -Salvador Dali
69- “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.” -Salvador Dali
70- “The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.” -Salvador Dali
71- “God is just another artist, like me.” -Salvador Dali
72- “I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.” -Salvador Dali
73- “Everything that is contradictory creates life.” -Salvador Dali
74- “Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.” -Salvador Dali
75- “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.” -Salvador Dali
75- “Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.” -Salvador Dali
76- “To be interesting, one has to provoke.” -Salvador Dali
77- “Beauty should be edible, or not at all.” -Salvador Dali
78- “Let my enemies devour each other.” -Salvador Dali
79- “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.” -Salvador Dali
80- “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.” -Salvador Dali
81- “Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality…” -Salvador Dali
82- “Life is too short to remain unnoticed.” -Salvador Dali
83- “I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.” -Salvador Dali
84- “It is either easy or impossible.” -Salvador Dali
85- “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.” -Salvador Dali
86- “Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.” -Salvador Dali
87- “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.” -Salvador Dali
88- “Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad.” -Salvador Dali
89- “Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.” -Salvador Dali
90- “I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.” -Salvador Dali
91- “Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.” -Salvador Dali
92- “Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.” -Salvador Dali
93- “Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead.” -Salvador Dali
94- “It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.” -Salvador Dali
95- “Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.” -Salvador Dali
96- “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.” -Salvador Dali
97- “Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.” -Salvador Dali
98- “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.” -Salvador Dali
99- “Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.” -Salvador Dali
100- “Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.” -Salvador Dali
101- “My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her… I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.” -Salvador Dali
102- “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” -Salvador Dali
103- “Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.” -Salvador Dali
104- “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.” -Salvador Dali
105- “If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.” -Salvador Dali
106- “There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” -Salvador Dali
107- “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?” -Salvador Dali
108- “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” -Salvador Dali
109- “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” -Salvador Dali
110- “So little of what could happen does happen.” -Salvador Dali
111- “There is only one difference between a madman and myself. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.” -Salvador Dali
112- “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.” -Salvador Dali
113- “Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.” -Salvador Dali
114- “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” -Salvador Dali
115- “I am not strange. I am just not normal.” -Salvador Dali
116- “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.” -Salvador Dali
