André Breton

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

A word and everything is saved.A word and all is lost.

It is hard not to see into the future, faced with today's blind architecture - a thousand times more stupid and more revolting than that of other ages. How bored we shall be inside!

Past and future monopolize the poet__ sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Il faut que l__omme s___ade de cette lice ridicule qu__n lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d__n réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d__istoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux _ qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu__vec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme

There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life__ meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

I am the soul in limbo.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows

Tell me whom you haunt and I__l tell you who you are.

Because of the earth__ roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the __uthors of our days_ _ which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don__ agree?