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Ambition
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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
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Appearance
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I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.
-Salvador Dali
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Architecture
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The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.
-Salvador Dali
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Art
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I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
-Salvador Dali
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There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.
-Salvador Dali
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It is either easy or impossible.
-Salvador Dali
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This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
-Salvador Dali
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Artist, The
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I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first image I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired . . . I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to 'see', like a medium (very much so indeed), the images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting. Then, at the point commanded by them, I would paint, paint with the hot taste in my mouth that panting hunting dogs must have at the moment when they fasten their teeth into the game killed that very instant by a well-aimed shot. At times I would wait whole hours without any such images occuring. Then, not painting, I would remain in suspense, holding up one paw, from which the brush hung motionless, ready to pounce again upon the oneiric landscape of my canvas the moment the next explosion of my brain brought a new victim of my imagination bleeding to the ground.
-Salvador Dali, My Secret Life
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Contentment
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There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
-Salvador Dali
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Drugs
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Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
-Salvador Dali
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Image
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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
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Imitation
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Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
-Salvador Dali
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Leadership
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The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
-Salvador Dali
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Legacy
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Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
-Salvador Dali
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Madness
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The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
-Salvador Dali
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Memory
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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
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Mistakes
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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
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Modern, Modernism
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Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
-Salvador Dali
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Perfection
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Have no fear of perfection-you'll never reach it.
-Salvador Dali
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Poetry
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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
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Respect
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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
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Shame
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I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
-Salvador Dali
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Style
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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
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Success & Failure
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The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
-Salvador Dali
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Television
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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
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Books by and about Salvador Dali