André Breton and his brother Louis-André were among the first daguerreotypists in Paris in 1839. The Breton brothers operated a studio at rue Servandoni 4, Paris, where they manufactured optical instruments along with instruments for physics, chemistry, and mathematics. They also had a shop at rue Petit-Bourbon 9, where they sold insruments and daguerreotypes.
My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness.
The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?,Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.
The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows,Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
I am the soul in limbo.
(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning - that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself - is not earned by work.
What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.
The imaginary is what tends to become real.
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
Humor (is) the process that allows one to brush reality aside when it gets too distressing.
Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.
At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.
I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.
There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.
They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. ""Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself,May night continue to fall upon the orchestra,Time is a tease,It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams. . . Man. . . is above all the plaything of his memory.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. .
