Salvador Dalí

Visual Arts Spanish 1904 – 1989 305 quotes

Master surrealist, Persistence of Memory

Most quoted

"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of rational intuition."

— from The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

"The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition."

— from The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

"I am painting pictures which make me die for joy, I am creating with an absolute naturalness, without the slightest aesthetic concern, I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly."

— from Letter to André Breton, 1929

All quotes by Salvador Dalí (305)

The universe is a giant anagram of my name.

Remark

I am the only one who knows the secret of my own painting.

Remark

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Letter 1929

I am not a surrealist. I am a hyperrealist of the imaginary.

Interview

The future of art is in the rhinoceros horn.

Lecture: 'The Phenomenological Aspects of the Paranoiac-Critical Method' 1956