Tristan Tzara Quotations

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

Dada covers things with an artificial tenderness. It is snowing butterflies that have escaped from a prophet's head.

Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.

We have always made mistakes, but the greatest mistakes are the poems we have written.

When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning.

I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles.

Art needs an operation

Always destroy what is in you.

Thought is made in the mouth.

Let us try for once not to be right.

I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way." - Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.

Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE

The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

In principle, I am against principles.

Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.

Everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.

To make a poem, take one newspaper, one pair of scissors, snip the words one by one and put them in a bag. Shake gently, draw them out at random, and copy them conscientiously... DADA est mort. DADA est idiot. Vive DADA!

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.