110+ Salvador Dali Quotes On Art, Surrealism And Dreams

Salvador Dali was a Spanish surrealist painter who became famous for his dreamlike and often bizarre imagery. He was known for his flamboyant and eccentric behavior, as well as his technical skill and precision in the execution of his paintings. His most famous works include The Persistence of Memory and The Burning Giraffe. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Salvador Dali on art, surrealism, dreams.

Top 10 Salvador Dali Quotes

1. A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
2. Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dali.
3. Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.
4. No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.
5. Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.
6. There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
7. One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.
8. Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
9. Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.
10. There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Salvador Dali Image Quotes

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist. — Salvador Dali

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. — Salvador Dali

Life is too short to remain unnoticed — Salvador Dali

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents. — Salvador Dali

I don't do drugs. I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Short Quotes

• The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
• Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
• Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.
• Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.
• Let my enemies devour each other.
• The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets
• I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
• Qui sait déguster ne boit plus jamais de vin, mais goûte des secrets
• The problem with the youth of today' is that one is no longer part of it.
• Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

Salvador Dali Quotes About Art

Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art — Salvador Dali

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. — Salvador Dali

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait. — Salvador Dali

It is either easy or impossible. — Salvador Dali

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. — Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. — Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. — Salvador Dali

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. — Salvador Dali

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. — Salvador Dali

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Quotes About Surrealism

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone. — Salvador Dali

Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality. — Salvador Dali

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings. — Salvador Dali

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums. — Salvador Dali

Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise! — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Quotes About Life

Life is too short to remain unnoticed — Salvador Dali

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments — Salvador Dali

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures. — Salvador Dali

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything! — Salvador Dali

The daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, he ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from the rest of mankind. — Salvador Dali

I am not strange. I am just not normal. — Salvador Dali

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise they adore me. — Salvador Dali

Everything that is contradictory creates life — Salvador Dali

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Quotes About Love

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob. — Salvador Dali

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all. — Salvador Dali

For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful. — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Quotes About Difference

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. — Salvador Dali

There is one thing more exasperating than a spouse who can cook and won't, and that's a spouse who can't cook and will. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. — Salvador Dali

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad. — Salvador Dali

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad. — Salvador Dali

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings. — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Quotes About Drugs

I don't do drugs. I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic. — Salvador Dali

I don't need drugs. I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

I do not take drugs. I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

I don't take drugs: I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali Famous Quotes And Sayings

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist. — Salvador Dali

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. — Salvador Dali

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. — Salvador Dali

Life is too short to remain unnoticed — Salvador Dali

I don't do drugs. I am drugs. — Salvador Dali

I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality. — Salvador Dali

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making. — Salvador Dali

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

And now the announcement of Watson and Crick about DNA. This is for me the real proof of the existence of God. — Salvador Dali

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful. — Salvador Dali

Beauty should be edible, or not at all. — Salvador Dali

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust. — Salvador Dali

Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end? — Salvador Dali

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind. — Salvador Dali

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí - and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today? — Salvador Dali

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms. — Salvador Dali

Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali. — Salvador Dali

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it. — Salvador Dali

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me. — Salvador Dali

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality. — Salvador Dali

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. — Salvador Dali

When the creations of a genius collide with the mind of a layman, and produce an empty sound, there is little doubt as to which is at fault. — Salvador Dali

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning. — Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. — Salvador Dali

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory. — Salvador Dali

God invented man, and man invented the metric system. — Salvador Dali

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it. — Salvador Dali

I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed. — Salvador Dali

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. — Salvador Dali

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire. — Salvador Dali

Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision. — Salvador Dali

Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something.... If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ignominiously. — Salvador Dali

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant's revolution, but one of the extreme Right. — Salvador Dali

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it's the one thing, unfortunately, you can't help being. — Salvador Dali

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis. — Salvador Dali

Happy is he who causes a scandal — Salvador Dali

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes! — Salvador Dali

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. — Salvador Dali

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! — Salvador Dali

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. — Salvador Dali

It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures — Salvador Dali

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas. — Salvador Dali

Forever will be you and me. — Salvador Dali

Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you. — Salvador Dali

I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die. — Salvador Dali

God is just another artist, like me. — Salvador Dali

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless. — Salvador Dali

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali — Salvador Dali

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power. — Salvador Dali

Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dali. — Salvador Dali

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting. — Salvador Dali

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me. — Salvador Dali

I do not believe in my death. — Salvador Dali

Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?" Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches. — Salvador Dali

Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us — Salvador Dali

Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead — Salvador Dali

I shall be so brief that I have already finished. — Salvador Dali

Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later... when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies. — Salvador Dali

Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad. — Salvador Dali

Without hesitation, I place Freud among the heroes. He dispossessed the Jewish people of the greatest and most influential of all heroes-Moses. — Salvador Dali

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas. — Salvador Dali

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future — Salvador Dali

Life Lessons by Salvador Dali

1. Salvador Dali taught us to embrace the unconventional and to never be afraid to explore the unknown. He encouraged us to be creative and to think outside of the box when it comes to problem solving.
2. He also showed us the power of dedication and hard work. He worked tirelessly to perfect his craft and to create masterpieces that will be remembered for generations to come.
3. Finally, he taught us to never be afraid to take risks and to always strive to be the best version of ourselves. He was an innovator and a risk-taker, and his life and work serve as an inspiration to us all.