Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work
Dalí’s artistic repertoire included painting, graphic arts, film, sculpture, design, and photography, at times in collaboration with other artists. He also wrote fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays, and criticism. Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork.
There are two major museums devoted to Salvador Dalí’s work: the Dalí Theatre Museum in Figueres, Spain, and the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.
List of quotes
| 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. |
| 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. |
| There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad. |
| Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. |
| The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents. |
| There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction. |
| Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. |
| It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning. |
| 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 have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. |
| I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it. |
| 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. |
| Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali. |
| Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. |
| Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. |
| Let my enemies devour each other. |
| Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory. |
| 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. |
| Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. |
| 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. |
| Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic. |
| 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. |
| The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad. |
| The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. |
| The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. |
| 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. |
| Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. |
| Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. |