101 Salvador Dali Quotes From The Surreal Spanish Artist

Salvador Dali's real and complete name was Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech.

Salvador Dali was born on 11 May 1904. He was a surrealist artist who was born in Figueres, Catalonia.

Dali was world-famous for his technical skill and the bizarre and striking images in his work. He studied fine arts in Madrid. Influenced by great masters from a very young age, Salvador was quite attracted to their work. In the late '20s, he moved closer to surrealism and became one of the Surrealist group's leading exponents. His most famous work, 'The Persistence Of Memory' is his best and most renowned surrealist painting.

Here, we have collected lots of Salvador Dali quotes, you can also read some Picasso quotes and Jackson Pollock quotes right here on Kidadl!
 

The best Salvador Dali quotes include, "those who don't want to imitate anything, produce nothing," "mistakes are almost always of sacred nature, never try to correct them," and "a true artist is the one who inspires others." Discover these and more here.

1. "Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

- Salvador Dali.

2. "Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future."

- Salvador Dali.

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

- Salvador Dali.

4. "Everything alters me, but nothing changes me."

- Salvador Dali.

5. "It is either easy or impossible."

- Salvador Dali.

6. "What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it."

- Salvador Dali.

7. "I am a contradictory and paradoxical man."

- Salvador Dali.

8. "I love my enemies when they are intelligent as much as I hate the stupid ones who defend me."

- Salvador Dali.

9. "Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly."

- Salvador Dali.

10. "I am not strange. I am just not normal."

- Salvador Dali.

11. "I'm going to live forever. Geniuses don't die."

- Salvador Dali.

12. "Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."

- Salvador Dali.

13. "It is not important 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.

14. "Life is too short to remain unnoticed."

- Salvador Dali.

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

- Salvador Dali.

16. "God invented man, and man invented the metric system."

- Salvador Dali.

17. "The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it."

- Salvador Dali.

18. "I believe in general in death but in the death of Dali absolutely not. I believe in my death becoming very – almost impossible."

- Salvador Dali.

19. "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.

20. "There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realize they adore me."

- Salvador Dali.

Here are some of Salvador Dali's quotes that show what love is and how it looks and feels with time.

21. "It's better to have loved and lost than have forty pounds of laundry a week."

- Salvador Dali.

22. "I absolutely love life."

- Salvador Dali.

23. "Let my enemies devour each other."

- Salvador Dali.

24. "Forever will be you and me."

- Salvador Dali.

25. “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.

26. "Everything that is contradictory creates life."

- Salvador Dali.

27. "Beauty should be edible, or not at all."

- Salvador Dali.

28. "I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it."

- Salvador Dali.

29. "Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali..."

- Salvador Dali.

30. "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.

31. "It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures."

- Salvador Dali.

32. "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, 'Hidden Faces'.

33. "For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful."

- Salvador Dali.

In this category, you will find Salvador Dali quotes on vision and dreams.

34. "Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

- Salvador Dali.

35. "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.

36. "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.

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

- Salvador Dali.

38. "You have to create confusion systematically, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life."

- Salvador Dali.

39. "To gaze is to think."

- Salvador Dali.

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

- Salvador Dali.

41. "I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style."

- Salvador Dali.

42. "No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist."

- Salvador Dali.

43. "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.

44.  "The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents."

- Salvador Dali.

45. "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.

46. "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.

47. "Democratic societies are pretty unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making."

- Salvador Dali.

48. "It is only good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always and always the first handicap to any creative functioning."

- Salvador Dali.

If you are an artist, you will find quotes that you might relate to within this category.

49. "A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others."

- Salvador Dali.

50. "The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas."

- Salvador Dali.

51. "Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters."

- Salvador Dali.

52. "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.

53. "Drawing is the honesty of the art."

- Salvador Dali.

54. "This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art."

- Salvador Dali.

55. "Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. "

- Salvador Dali.

56. "If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

- Salvador Dali, '50 Secrets Of Magic Craftsmanship'.

57. "Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

- Salvador Dali.

58. "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.

59. "I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them; does not imply that they are meaningless."

- Salvador Dali.

60. "I do not paint a portrait to make it look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait."

- Salvador Dali.

61. "People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings."

- Salvador Dali.

62. "God is just another artist, like me."

- Salvador Dali.

63. "The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas."

- Salvador Dali.

64. "The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture."

- Salvador Dali.

65. "All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting."

- Salvador Dali.

Discover quotes from Salvador Dali on surrealism.

66. "Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

- Salvador Dali.

67. "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

- Salvador Dali.

68. "Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire."

- Salvador Dali.

69. "The one and only thing the world will never have enough of is outrageous."

- Salvador Dali.

70. "Knowing how to look is a way of inventing."

- Salvador Dali.

71. "Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health."

- Salvador Dali.

72. "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.

73. "There is just one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad."

- Salvador Dali.

74. "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.

75. "I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali..."

- Salvador Dali.

76. "Let the labyrinth of the wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with red-hot iron of my very own life, let my hair whiten and my step becomes vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul."

- Salvador Dali.

77. "Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality."

- Salvador Dali.

78. "Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of surprise!"

- Salvador Dali.

79. "Before I was born it was completely paradise… the moment of [being] born is the moment the paradise is lost. Death is the regain of this paradise."

- Salvador Dali.

80. "The difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist."

- Salvador Dali.

Dali's quotes can be rather insightful.

81. "I am hallucinogenic."

- Salvador Dali.

82.  "Money is a glory."

- Salvador Dali.

83. "There are days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

- Salvador Dali.

84. "I shall be so brief that I have already finished."

- Salvador Dali.

85. "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.

86. "An unpredictable, objective, and faithful hazard seem to have systematically singled out the life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, memorable, and phenomenal."

- Salvador Dali, 'The Secret Life Of Salvador Dali'.

Some more great Dali quotes are found here.

87. "Wars have never ever hurt anybody except the people who died."

- Salvador Dali.

88. "The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets."

- Salvador Dali.

89. "An elegant woman is the one who despises you and has no hair under her arms."

- Salvador Dali, 'The Secret Life Of Salvador Dali'.

90. "Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism."

- Salvador Dali.

91. "The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret."

- Salvador Dali.

92. "So little of what could happen does happen."

- Salvador Dali.

93. "Whoever wants to engage people's interest must provoke them."

- Salvador Dali.

94. "Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future."

- Salvador Dali.

95. "My mother's death supervened, and it was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her..."

- Salvador Dali.

96. "I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas."

- Salvador Dali.

97. "Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most."

- Salvador Dali.

98. "There's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure."

- Salvador Dali.

99. "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."

- Salvador Dali.

100. "I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone."

- Salvador Dali.

101. "Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius."

- Salvador Dali.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Salvador Dali quotes, then why not take a look at these Henri Matisse quotes or Banksy quotes for more?