Last Updated on 22 June 2024

Quotes from Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

• 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.
• Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
• Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
• 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.
• Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
• Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.
• I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
• I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
• I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.
• If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.
• Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
• 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.
• No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.
• 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.
• So little of what could happen does happen.
• Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
• There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
• There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
• The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
• Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
• Whoever wants to engage people’s interest must provoke them.
• You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.