Magritte Quotes

“That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.”
― Amy Reed, Crazy

“All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.”
― Michel Foucault

“Foolishness consists in believing you understand what you really don't.”
― Silvano Levy, Decoding Magritte

“Painting is not therefore an imitation of objects. The reality of the external world acts as a point of departure, but painting takes the skin off this reality in order to touch the mind.”
― Silvano Levy, Decoding Magritte

“Magritte presents ordinary objects in impossible contexts. He challenges us to consider our place in relation to the world: our own humanity.”
― Liz Rideal, How to Read Paintings

“Magritte presents ordinary objects in impossible contexts. He challenges us to our place in relation to the world: our own humanity.”
― Liz Rideal, How to Read Art: A Crash Course in Understanding and Interpreting Paintings

“Magritte’s variations on the same theme invite us to rethink conventional notions of originality, to look more carefully at the details and contrasts between different versions of the painting: we observe the architectural variations of the Belgian houses, the varieties of trees in the foreground, of the streetlamps and their shadows, and of the skyscapes.

Some of these paintings are in portrait format, others in landscape; some, like the 1961 version, give the viewer a deeper sense of proximity to, or immersion in, the scene while in others the depicted world is more distant. Together, these variant paintings form an internal system of poetic rhythms and patterns in which cross-references abound, alongside allusions to older Belgian art, most notably La Maison rose (1892) by the symbolist William Degouve de Nuncques.”
― Sotherby's