Salvador Dalí, born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, was a renowned Spanish surrealist artist known for his eccentricity and imaginative works. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, experimenting with various styles before moving to Paris and joining the Surrealist movement. Dalí’s iconic work, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), exemplifies his dreamlike, bizarre imagery influenced by psychoanalysis and his “paranoiac-critical” method. In 1929, he met his muse and future wife, Gala Éluard. Throughout his career, Dalí ventured into various mediums, including film and sculpture, collaborating with figures like Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Despite some criticism for his later commercial focus, he remained influential. Dalí died on January 23, 1989, in Figueres, leaving a lasting legacy with works housed in the Dalí Theatre-Museum.

Salvador Dalí Quotes

1. “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”
— Salvador Dalí

2. “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”
— Salvador Dalí

3. “Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
— Salvador Dalí

4. “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”
— Salvador Dalí

5. “I am not strange. I am just not normal.”
— Salvador Dalí

6. “Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.”
— Salvador Dalí

7. “There is only one difference between a madman and myself. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”
— Salvador Dalí

8. “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
— Salvador Dalí

9. “So little of what could happen does happen.”
— Salvador Dalí

10. “There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
— Salvador Dalí

11. “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”
— Salvador Dalí

12. “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
— Salvador Dalí

13. “Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

15. “It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
— Salvador Dalí

16. “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 Dalí

17. “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 Dalí

18. “I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.”
— Salvador Dalí

19. “Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. ”
— Salvador Dalí

20. “Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
— Salvador Dalí

21. “It is either easy or impossible.”
— Salvador Dalí

22. “Life is too short to remain unnoticed.”
— Salvador Dalí

23. “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 Dalí

24. “Let my enemies devour each other.”
— Salvador Dalí

25. “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 Dalí

26. “To be interesting, one has to provoke.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

28. “If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

30. “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.”
— Salvador Dalí

31. “Everything that is contradictory creates life.”
— Salvador Dalí

32. “An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”
— Salvador Dalí

33. “God is just another artist, like me.”
— Salvador Dalí

34. “The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”
— Salvador Dalí

35. “The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.”
— Salvador Dalí

36. “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 Dalí

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

38. “There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realise they adore me.”
— Salvador Dalí

39. “All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.”
— Salvador Dalí

40. “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 Dalí

41. “If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”
— Salvador Dalí

42. “The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets.”
— Salvador Dalí

43. “For me, love must be ugly, looks must be divine, and death must be beautiful.”
— Salvador Dalí

44. “Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.”
— Salvador Dalí

45. “Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius.”
— Salvador Dalí

46. “Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future.”
— Salvador Dalí

47. “People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.”
— Salvador Dalí

48. “Beauty should be edible, or not at all.”
— Salvador Dalí

49. “Who knows how to taste wine never drinks wine again, but tastes secrets instead.”
— Salvador Dalí

50. “Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.”
— Salvador Dalí

51. “Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.”
— Salvador Dalí

52. “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 Dalí

53. “Right now I’m the greatest. I don’t say this through vanity. It’s just that the rest are so bad.”
— Salvador Dalí

54. “Drawing is the honesty of the art.”
— Salvador Dalí

55. “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 Dalí

56. “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 Dalí

57. “The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.”
— Salvador Dalí

58. “God invented man, and man invented the metric system.”
— Salvador Dalí

59. “Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.”
— Salvador Dalí

60. “Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.”
— Salvador Dalí

61. “I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I’m never served a cooked telephone.”
— Salvador Dalí

62. “I do not believe in my death.”
— Salvador Dalí

63. “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 Dalí

64. “I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”
— Salvador Dalí

65. “We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.”
— Salvador Dalí

66. “Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

68. “Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.”
— Salvador Dalí

69. “Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.”
— Salvador Dalí

70. “The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.”
— Salvador Dalí

71. “Geniuses must never die, the progress of mankind depends on us.”
— Salvador Dalí

72. “Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality…”
— Salvador Dalí

73. “Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.”
— Salvador Dalí

74. “The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments.”
— Salvador Dalí

75. “I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.”
— Salvador Dalí

76. “The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”
— Salvador Dalí

77. “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 Dalí

78. “When I paint, the Sea Roars Others Splash about in the bath.”
— Salvador Dalí

79. “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 Dalí

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

81. “Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.”
— Salvador Dalí

82. “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 Dalí

83. “Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!”
— Salvador Dalí

84. “We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

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

87. “Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.”
— Salvador Dalí

88. “The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

90. “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

92. “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 Dalí

93. “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 Dalí

94. “Many people do not reach their eighties because they spend too much time in their forties.”
— Salvador Dalí

95. “Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.”
— Salvador Dalí

96. “Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure.”
— Salvador Dalí

97. “The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.”
— Salvador Dalí

98. “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
— Salvador Dalí

99. “Forever will be you and me.”
— Salvador Dalí

100. “Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.”
— Salvador Dalí

101. “Happy is he who causes a scandal.”
— Salvador Dalí

102. “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 Dalí

103. “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 Dalí

104. “Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision…”
— Salvador Dalí

105. “I will be sof brief, I have already finished.”
— Salvador Dalí

106. “It is mostly with your blood, Gala that I paint my pictures.”
— Salvador Dalí

107. “I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”
— Salvador Dalí

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

109. “I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.”
— Salvador Dalí

110. “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 Dalí

111. “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 Dalí

112. “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 Dalí

113. “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 Dalí