Best 34 quotes of Rene Magritte on MyQuotes

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

A truly poetic canvas is an awakened dream.

Do not accept any explanation of the world either through chance or determinism. You are not responsible for your belief. It is not even you who decides that you are not responsible - and so on to infinity. You are not obliged to believe. There is no point of departure.

Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well.

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

I detest my past, and anyone else's. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and obligatory beautiful feelings. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, voices making announcements, aerodynamism, boy scouts, the smell of moth balls, events of the moment, and drunken people.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

I have few illusions: the cause is lost in advance. As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion.

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.

I need to see the original paintings just as little as I have to read the original manuscripts of books.

I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.

Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

My investigations resembled the pursuit of the solution to a problem for which I had three data: the object, the thing connected with it in the shadow of my consciousness, and the light wherein that thing would become apparent.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

No object is stuck with its name so irrevocably that one cannot find another which suits it better.

Nothing is confused except the mind.

Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.

Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities - it is bound up in the series of activities - that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring.

People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.

The present reeks of mediocrity and the atom bomb.

The purpose of art is mystery.

Those who become entangled in these false ideas are prevented from perceiving the Integral Oneness.

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.

As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child.

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.