Salvador Dali Quotations

1. "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 every since."

2. "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."

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. "There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

5. "Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."

6. "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."

7. "Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

8. "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."

9. "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."

10. "I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."

11. "I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it."

12. "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."

13. "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

14. "Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

15. "When I paint, the ocean roars. Others merely paddle in their bath."

16. "Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I."

17. "God is just another artist, like me."

18. "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."

19. "I don't do drugs. I am drugs. Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic."

20. "The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad."

21. "I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

22. "It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning."

23. "The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."

24. "Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery."

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

26. "You know le worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is le worst for creativity. You know, Dali spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were le most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn’t know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to le movies or le theatre, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. Le people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!"

27. "Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."

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

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

30. "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."

31. "What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms."

32. "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. It was very painful."

33. "There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure."

34. "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."