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Various Short Quotes of Andre Breton The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God! If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable. Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory. Andre Breton So strong is the belief in life,
in what is most fragile in life--real life, I mean--that in the end this
belief is lost.
The poetic embrace like the
carnal While it endures Forbids all lapse into the miseries of the world.
Everything tends to make us
believe that there exists a certainpoint of the mind at which life and
death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and
the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradicitons.
Let us not mince words: the
marvelous is always beautiful. anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact
only the marvelous is beautiful.
And ever since I have had a
great desire to show forbearance to scientific musing, however unbecoming,
in the final analysis, from every point of view. Radio? Fine. Syphilis?
If you like. Photography? I don't see any reason why not. The cinema? Three
cheers for darkened years. War? Gave us a good laugh. The telephone? Hello.
Youth? Charming white hair. Try to make me say thank you: "Thank you."
Thank you.
(Surrealism) declares that it
is able, by its own means, to uproot thought from an increasingly cruel
state of thralldom, to steer it back onto the path of total comprehension,
return it to its original purity.
The simplest Surrealist act
consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly,
as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Surrealism, as I envisage it,
proclaims loudly enough our absolute nonconformity, that there may be no
question of calling it, in the case against the real world, as a witness
for the defense. It could only account, on the contrary, for the complete
state of distraction which we hope to attain here below. Kant's absentmindedness
about
women, Pasteur's absentmindedness about "grapes," Curie's absentmindedness
about vehicles, are in this respect, deeply symptomatic*.
*There is an ascending gradation
here in the consequences of absentmindedness. Kant was a confirmed bachelor
who completely ignored women all his life. Pasteur on the other hand was
involved once in a rather ridiculous incident when, during a meal, he carefully
washed grapes in a glass of water, explaining to his guests the importance
of eliminating germs from food--and then, distracted, drank the soiled
water in the glass. As for Curie, his absentmindedness caused his death:
he was run over by a carriage and killed while crossing a street.
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