Frasi di Salvador Dalí

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“Che cos'è il cielo? Dove si trova? Il cielo non si trova né sopra né sotto, né a destra né a sinistra; il cielo è esattamente nel centro del petto dell'uomo che ha fede!”

“Non aver paura della perfezione: non la raggiungerai mai.”

“L’intelligenza senza ambizione è come un uccello senza ali.”

“Il primo uomo che comparò le guance di una donna a una rosa era evidentemente un poeta, il primo che lo ripeté era probabilmente un idiota.”

“All’età di sei anni volevo essere un cuoco. A sette volevo essere Napoleone. E la mia ambizione è andata crescendo costantemente sin da allora.”

“Le guerre non hanno mai fatto male a nessuno tranne alle persone che vi muoiono.”

“L’arte progressista può aiutare le persone a conoscere non solo le forze oggettive all’opera nella società in cui vivono ma anche il carattere intensamente sociale delle loro vite interiori. In ultimo può spingere le persone verso l’emancipazione sociale.”

“Le persone adorano il mistero ed è per questo che amano i miei quadri.”

“L'intelligenza senza ambizione è come un uccello senza ali.”

“Non preoccuparti di essere moderno. Sfortunatamente è la sola cosa che, qualsiasi cosa tu faccia, non potrai evitare.”

“Gli errori hanno quasi sempre una natura sacra. Non cercare di correggerli. Al contrario: razionalizzali, comprendili totalmente. Dopodichè, sarà possibile per te sublimarli.”

“Sono il primo a essere sorpreso e spesso terrorizzato dalle immagini che vedo apparire sulla mia tela.”

“Il meno che si possa chiedere a una scultura è che stia ferma.”

“Ogni mattina, al risveglio, provo un piacere supremo, il piacere di essere Salvador Dalí.”

“Dalla Rivoluzione francese si è sviluppata la viziosa tendenza rincretinente a pensare che i geni (a parte la loro opera) siano degli esseri umani più o meno simili in tutto al resto dei comuni mortali. Ciò è falso. E se ciò è falso per me che sono, nella nostra epoca, il genio dalla spiritualità più vasta, un vero genio moderno, è ancora più falso per i geni che incarnarono l'apogeo del Rinascimento, come Raffaello genio quasi divino.”

“Ho un pensiero daliniano: l’unica cosa di cui il mondo non avrà mai abbastanza è l’esagerazione.”

“Dio inventò l'uomo, e l'uomo inventò il sistema metrico.”

“Le società democratiche sono poco adatte alla pubblicazione di rivelazioni così fragorose come quelle che io sono solito fare.”

“Io non mi drogo. Io sono la droga.”

“Cos'è mai l'apparecchio televisivo per l'uomo, che deve solo chiudere i suoi occhi per vedere le più inaccessibili regioni di ciò che è stato visto e di ciò che non lo è mai stato,…che deve solo penetrare attraverso i muri per far sì che tutte le orbite della Baghdad dei suoi sogni risorgano dalla polvere.”

“C'è solo una differenza tra un pazzo e me. Il pazzo pensa di essere sano di mente. Io so di essere pazzo.”

“Ci sono giorni in cui credo di morire per un'overdose di soddisfazione.”

“Il termometro del successo è semplicemente l'invidia degli scontenti.”

“Dipingere è una parte infinitamente piccola della mia personalità.”

“Quando il denaro piace quanto piace a me non è nulla di meno che mistica. Il denaro è una meraviglia.”

“Lasciate che i miei nemici si divorino l’un l’altro.”

“Io credo che il momento sarà vicino quando, attraverso una procedura di attivo pensiero paranoico, sarà possibile sistematizzare la confusione e contribuire a gettare un totale discredito sul mondo della realtà.”

“Il disegno è la sincerità nell'arte. Non ci sono possibilità di imbrogliare. O è bello o è brutto.”

“Per acquistare un crescente e duraturo rispetto in società, è una buona cosa, se possiedi un grande talento, di dare, presto nella tua giovinezza, un bel calcio al garretto destro della società che ami. Dopo questo, sii uno snob.”

“E' il buon gusto, e il buon gusto soltanto, che possiede il potere di rendere sterile, ed è sempre il primo handicap per ogni funzione creativa.”

“La differenza tra le memorie false e quelle vere è la stessa che per i gioielli: sono sempre quelli falsi che sembrano i più veri, i più brillanti.”

“Siamo tutti affamati e assetati di immagini reali. L'arte astratta sarà buona per una cosa:restituire all'arte figurativa la sua esatta verginità.”

“Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation... I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved... If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize.”

“The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.”

“Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.... life.”

“I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'. In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.”

“I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of mt erotic-emotional life.”

“Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision..”

“Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born... All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.”

“July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect.”

“It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time... I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros.... NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit.”

“September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.”

“I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning!”

“The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality... I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.”

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

“The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art”

“I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.”

“We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.”

“Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards... To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that.”

“There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.”

“In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown.”

“One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.”

“You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!”

“My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.... as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject.”

“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”

“Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational.”

“My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh.”

“the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne.”

“Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.”

“And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.”

“Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!”