Salvador Dali Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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