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

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

When I paint, the sea roars. The others splash about in the bath.
– Salvador Dali

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

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

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

Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.
– Salvador Dali

New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of
slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your
skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!
– Salvador Dali

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.
– 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

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
– 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

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

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador
Dali.
– Salvador Dali

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.
– 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

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

Those who do not want the imitate anything, produce nothing.
– Salvador Dali

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
– 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

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
– 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 one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
– Salvador Dali

There is more madness to my method than method to my madness.
– Salvador Dali

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

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.
– 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

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
– Salvador Dali

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

Happy is he who causes a scandal.
– Salvador Dali

So little of what could happen does happen.
– 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

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

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

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

Let my enemies devour each other.
– Salvador Dali

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.
– Salvador Dali

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
– Salvador Dali

It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.
– Salvador Dali

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our
vision.
– Salvador Dali

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
– 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

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

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

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