Andre Breton Quotes

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Dreams are not without meaning wherever thay may come from-from fantasy, from the elements, or from other inspiration.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Symbols are important.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

It's the old case against symbols: if you get them, they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.