Salvador Quotes

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

I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

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 is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?

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.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

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

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

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

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

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!

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

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

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

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.

So little of what could happen does happen.

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.

Let my enemies devour each other

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

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

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

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

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

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

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

One day I will forgive you; until then there are scabs everywhere that you have touched me.

Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.

Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.

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

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

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

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

Missing you is worse than Pittsburgh.

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

beauty has been known to drive men wild, like the sirens did. Man’s challenge is to steer clear from it.” - Salvadore about temptation

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

As Salvador Dalí said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

When a man wants something he must pursue it with all he has. - Salvadore, The Tutor by Kailin Gow

Rompe mi corazón pero no te vayas, nunca lo hagas.

Quién dijo que después de la tormenta hay sol, cuando puede haber un rayo.

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.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds.

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.

When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath

But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own.

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.

Salvador Dalí seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door.

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...

I asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.

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.

Al final de cuentas todos terminamos igual, en un boulevard de los sueños rotos.

The Coffee Guy, whose name is Rosie by the way, has moved to El Salvador.' I lied. This was not met with happy noises. 'He's turned his back on coffee and is in the wilds of Central America building houses for the poor. I think we should all take a moment away from our quest for coffee-satisfaction and think about this noble decision. As you clamor for caffeine and curse the hard-working but innocent staff at my store, Rosie is sitting in the bed of a beat-up pickup bumping across roads to make one room homes out of mud for those who have nothing at all

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!

And although Margarita lived in a world that predated Technicolor, she always dreamed of the boy in rich pastels.

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.

Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.

Rompe mi corazón si quieres, pero no te vayas. Nunca lo hagas.

There would be no sequel to the sadness

Mi locura es sagrada, no la toquen.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

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

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.

I will be your friend,' I said. 'I will go home to my mother's house the way I did when I skinned my knees as a little girl. I'll go and let myself be consoled by my roses, my palm trees, my enormous volcanoes in San Salvador. When you are old, maybe you'll come and see me someday.

¡Si nuestra amistad depende de cosas como el espacio y el tiempo, entonces, cuando por fin superemos el espacio y el tiempo, habremos destruido nuestra propia hermandad! Pero supera el espacio, y nos quedará sólo un Aquí. Supera el tiempo, y nos quedará sólo un Ahora. Y entre el Aquí y el Ahora, ¿no crees que podremos volver a vernos un par de veces?

Christians should put survival of the planet ahead of national security...Here is the mystery of our global responsibility: that we are in communion with Christ- and we are in communion with all people...The fact that the people of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Russia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia are our brothers and sisters is not obvious. People kill each other by the thousands and do not see themselves as brothers and sisters. If we want to be real peace-makers, national security cannot be our primary concern. Our primary concern should be survival of humanity, the survival of the planet, and the health of all people. Whether we are Russians, Iraqis, Ethiopians, or North Americans, we belong to the same human family that God loves. And we have to start taking some risks- not just individually, but risks of a more global quality, risks to let other people develop their own independence, risks to share our wealth with others and invite refugees to our country, risks to offer sanctuary- because we are people of God

One thing which I can't stress enough is thaft OCD is completely nonsensical and will not listen to reason. This is one of the most frightening things about having it. I knew that t o anyone I told, there are Salvador Dali paintings that make more sense.

Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be other-wise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peasants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs' repressive fury, are then called "violent revolutionaries" and "terrorists.

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.

لا تناقش غبياً لأن الناس لن تعرف أيكما الغبي

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 Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

And if we had learned anything from this story it was to be cautious of paper--to be mindful of its fragile construction and sharp edges, but mostly to be cautious of what is written on it.

El amor, dije yo, se parecía extrañamente a ciertas sensaciones gástricas de los primeros síntomas del mareo, que producían una inquietud y estremecimientos tan delicados que uno no estaba seguro de si estaba enamorado o iba a vomitar.

-Se que estoy jodido porque no me enamoré de sus virtudes...me enamoré de sus defectos.- Luke.

أعتقد أن اعذب الحريات للإنسان على الأرض أن يستطيع الحياة دون أن يكون مضطرا للعمل

Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Fuimos perfectamente imperfectos, pero a la vez fuimos ambos negativos. Las leyes de la física dicen que dos polos iguales se repelen, pero las reglas de las matemáticas dicen que negativo por negativo igualaba a positivo. Entonces, ¿qué fuimos Luke y yo?

Que hablen de uno, aunque sea bien

Rompe las cadenas de tu pensamiento, y romperás también las cadenas de tu cuerpo

كانت لدي خصلة رديئة منذ طفولتي ، وهي أني أعتبر نفسي مختلفا عن الناس العاديين ! وحتى في هذه نجحت .

No aprendas nada, y el próximo mundo será igual que éste, con las mismas limitaciones y pesos de plomo que superar

All of a sudden I found I was hoping against hope that the penguin would survive, because, as of that instant, he had a name and his name was Juan Salvador Pinguino and with his name came a surge of hope and the beginning of a bond that would last a lifetime. That was the moment at which he became my penguin, and whatever the future held, we'd face it together.

And in that moment of sun and joy, Lupe knew why she loved and also hated Salvador. He gave her wings. He didn't try to lock her in, as had Jaime and the other boys she'd known. No, she could dream her wildest dreams with him and so she loved him for this; but she also hated him because it made her fearful. No one in her family was like this. They were always very cautious.

What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch.

Only the family, society's smallest unit, can change and yet maintain enough continuity to rear children who will not be "strangers in a strange land," who will be rooted firmly enough to grow and adapt.

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

I take the sealed envelope from him—​the one that holds the information about my biological father. I ask him for his cigarette lighter. He hands it to me. I look at Sam and Fito and say, “Word for the day.” Sam understands and says, “Nurture.” I take the unopened envelope. I am watching myself as I take the lighter and place it over the edge of the paper. I am watching the envelope burn. I am watching the ashes floating up to the heavens. I am hearing myself as I tell my father, “I know who my father is. I have always known.” And now I am laughing. And my dad is laughing. And Fito is smiling that incredible smile of his. We are watching Sam dance around the yard as Maggie follows her and jumps up and barks. Sam is shouting out to me and the morning sky, “Your name is Salvador! Your name is Salvador! Your name is Salvador!

Tómame y destrúyeme, corazón resiste, solo una vez más será. Metafóricamente Weigel se volvió mi adicción. Y demonios. Tantas adicciones habiendo en este jodido mundo, sustituí la droga por una persona. Por ella. Por alguien que tarde o temprano se iría, se alejaría, desaparecería de mi vida con murmullos. Creí encontrar la felicidad, y así fue. La encontré, porque a su lado mis sonrisas se pintaban de sinceridad, de honestidad y aclamaban el amor puro que nunca quise sentir, aunque tener los pies sobre la tierra era algo que no me olvidaba de tener en cuenta. Siempre estuvo presente, y así sería. Líneas paralelas. Eso somos Weigel y yo. Tan juntos en una misma dirección y tan separadas que nunca se encuentran, sin embargo, a un punto de vista diferente se pueden visualizar juntas. En un infinito, pero juntas, y sí, aun así, el mismo infinito pueda ser un corto tiempo en segundos, está bien. Honestamente lo estaba. .

But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. If I could walk into the house and say, "Froggy, I'm sorry I left." If I could hug him and unbutton his shirt and pick the petals from his hair. If I could do that, there would be no reason for me to fight this war.

Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.

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, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.

She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.