Quotes of the Emperor

 The Imperial Sovereign of the Concordat Dynasty of the Trantorian Galactic Imperium is a deeply spiritual man, his utterances are studied throughout the Imperium.

 

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

An unpredictable, faithful and objective hazard seems to have systematically singled out my life to make what are normally uneventful incidents violent, phenomenal and memorable.

Art is honesty. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being me.

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

Give me two hours a day of useful activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

I absolutely love life.

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear in my mind.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

I’m much more interested in speaking, or being near people who think the opposite of the things I think, than with people who think the same things that I think.

If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

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.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

It is not me who is the clown, but this monstrously cynical and so unconsciously naive society, which plays the game of seriousness in order better to hide its madness.

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

It’s better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

Let my enemies devour each other.

Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul.

Life is too short to remain unnoticed.

Liking money  is nothing less than mysticism.

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.

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy person.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

Since I don’t smoke, I decided to grow a mustache—it is better for the health. However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: ‘Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?’

So little of what could happen does happen.

Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Surrealism is not a movement. It is a latent state of mind, perceivable through the powers of dream and nightmare.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

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.

The fact I myself do not understand my visions does not imply that they are meaningless.

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.

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.

The reason some portraits don’t look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of one’s malcontents.

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad. I will say something contrary to this tomorrow without regret or fear.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

Wars never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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.

What is a holovision 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.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

You have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.