As a renowned surrealist painter and leader of the avant-garde art movement, most famous Salvador Dali quotes help you gain a deeper understanding and propel yourself to success.
From finding your passion to breaking the rules and thinking outside the box, these powerful Salvador Dali quotes will help you take the first step towards creating a life of meaningful purpose. Discover quotes from Dali about life, love, creativity, surrealism, and much more.
Best Salvador Dali Quotes
Have no fear of perfection you’ll never reach it. Salvador Dali
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. 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
There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad. Salvador Dali
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy the joy of being Salvador Dali and I ask myself in rapture What wonderful things is this Salvador Dali going to accomplish today? Salvador Dali
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. Salvador Dali
There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction. Salvador Dali
What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it. Salvador Dali
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents. Salvador Dali
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. Salvador Dali
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. Salvador Dali
An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms. Salvador Dali
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. Salvador Dali
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
The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. Salvador Dali
Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. Salvador Dali
I am not strange. I am just not normal. Salvador Dali
Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. 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
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
I have Dalinian thought the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. Salvador Dali
I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it. Salvador Dali
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. Salvador Dali
Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. Salvador Dali
It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself. Salvador Dali
We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right. Salvador Dali
Everything alters me, but nothing changes me. 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
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. Salvador Dali
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. Salvador Dali
So little of what could happen does happen. Salvador Dali
Let my enemies devour each other. Salvador Dali
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life. Salvador Dali
People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings. Salvador Dali
Beauty should be edible, or not at all. Salvador Dali
Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure that of being Salvador Dali. Salvador Dali
Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty two in dreams. Salvador Dali
Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory. Salvador Dali
It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week. Salvador Dali
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
Everyone should eat hashish, but only once. Salvador Dali
I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone. Salvador Dali
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art. 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
The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures. 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
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
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
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
Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making. 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
The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous. Salvador Dali
Don’t argue with an idiot because people won’t know which of you is stupid. Salvador Dali
I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties. Salvador Dali
Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare. Salvador Dali
My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her. I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul. Salvador Dali
When we are a sleep in this world, we are awake in another. Salvador Dali
If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it. Salvador Dali
Happy is he who causes a scandal. Salvador Dali
An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable. 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
Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire. Salvador Dali
The difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist. Salvador Dali
The true painter must be able, before an infinite panorama, to limit himself to reproducing a single ant. Salvador Dali
I am very sorry, but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know more about Raphael than all of you altogether. Salvador Dali
Even in the matter of moustaches I was going to surpass Nietzsche! Mine would not be depressing, catastrophic, burdened by Wagnerian music and mist. No! It would be line thin, imperialistic, ultra rationalistic, and pointing towards heaven, like the vertical mysticism, like the vertical Spanish syndicates. Salvador Dali
I have always been an anarchist and a monarchist. Salvador Dali
I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called, The Tower of Babel. I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue! At this period my sexual anxiety disappeared almost completely, and the philosophic theories of my book took up all the room in my psychic activity. Salvador Dali
Let them talk about one, even if it’s good. Salvador Dali
I always paint those vast sandy expanses that go as far as the eye can see. I don’t know why; I have never been in North Africa. I suppose it’s an atavism of the Arab blood. Salvador Dali
Love, I said, was strangely like certain gastric sensations in the first symptoms of dizziness, producing such delicate restlessness and quivering that one was not sure whether one was in love or was going to vomit. Salvador Dali
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. Salvador Dali
My madness is sacred, don’t touch it. Salvador Dali
No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist. Salvador Dali
The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it. Salvador Dali
It is not me who is the clown, but the monstrously cynical and so unconsciously naive society, which plays the game of seriousness in order better to hide its madness. Salvador Dali
Where, if not in my own town, should the most extravagant and solid of my work endure, where if not here? The Municipal Theatre, or what remained of it, struck me as very appropriate. Salvador Dali
It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures. Salvador Dali
There is more madness to my method than method to my madness. Salvador Dali
For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful. Salvador Dali
One day it will be officially admitted that what we have Christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams. Salvador Dali
I always carried a jewel studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. Salvador Dali
