Salvador Dali Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Salvador Dali
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
The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

Salvador Dali
Telegram sent to Picasso:
Pablo, thanks! Your last ignominious paintings have killed modern art.
This is just a part of the telegram

Salvador Dali
Only as Picasso is an anarchist, after having knifed Bouguereau half to death, he was going to give the puntilla, and finish off modern art at one blow by outuglying, alone, in a single day, the ugly that all the others combined could turn out in several years.
Puntilla: The small dagger to administer the coup de grâce to the bull.

Salvador Dali
Because in the modern physics everything is weak, every proton and neutron is surrounded of weakness, of nothing. In this moment the most fantastic thing in physics is le anti-matter. Every new physician talk about anti-matter, and Dali paint, 20 years ago, le first anti-matter angels.

Salvador Dali
When asked what does a painter contribute to the world and to his fellowmen:
Raphael paints because of the cosmogony of Raphael. Raphael is the Renaissance period. Dali paints the atomic age and the Freudian age nuclear things and psychologic things.

Salvador Dali
My personality is more important than any of these little facets of my activities.

Salvador Dali
Dali describing himself:
Salvador Dali, monarchist and anarchist, and consequently opposed to a consumer society, is naturally against automobiles, to which he prefers a triumphal chariot...

Salvador Dali
I began a happening in New York by announcing in front of three thousand spectators that Cézanne was a catastrophe of congenital awkwardness — a painter of decrepit structures of the past. I was applauded, principally because nobody knew who Cézanne was.

Salvador Dali
But I myself am living, and I will live without ever liking jazz or Chinese sculpture. I have never been a pacifist. I have never liked little children, or animals, or universal suffrage, or modern art, or El Greco, or theosophy.

Salvador Dali
If someone, even a handsome person, talks to me about horoscopes or asks me under what sign of the zodiac I was born, I never telephone him again. You see how miserly I am and how exceptional my intelligence must be.

Salvador Dali
Painters, do not fear perfection. You will never achieve it! If you are mediocrities, you may try as you will to paint terribly badly, but people will still see that you are mediocre.

Salvador Dali
Picasso is Spanish, I am too. Picasso is a genius. I am too. Picasso will be seventy-two and I about forty-eight. Picasso is known in every country of the world; so am I. Picasso is a Communist; I am not.

Salvador Dali
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
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
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

Salvador Dali
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Salvador Dali
Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

Salvador Dali
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
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
The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.
Variant: There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Salvador Dali
I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

Salvador Dali
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
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

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

Salvador Dali
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!

Salvador Dali
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
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