Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.


I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.


In the world we live in everything militates in favor of things that have not yet happened, of things that will never happen again.


It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.


Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.


No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.


No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.


Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.


Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.


To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.