Tristan Tzara Quotes

• In principle, I am against principles.

  Tristan Tzara

  Principles

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• Everyone dances to his own personal boomboom.

  Tristan Tzara

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

  Tristan Tzara

  Color, Opposites, Roaring

  "Dada manifesto" by Tristan Tzara, translated by Robert Motherwell, (1918); as quotes in "Dada Painters and Poets" by Robert Motherwell, New York, (pp. 78-81), 1951.

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

  Tristan Tzara

  Knows

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• Let us try for once not to be right.

  Tristan Tzara

  Trying

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

  Tristan Tzara

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• 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!

  Tristan Tzara

  Bags, Pairs, Idiot

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• 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.

  Tristan Tzara

  Buddhist, Passion, Butterfly

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

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Gentleman, Cameras

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• 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.

  Tristan Tzara

  Writing, Principles, Want

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• The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

  Tristan Tzara

  Depth, Summit

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• 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.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Literature, Journalism

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• 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.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, People, Interesting

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• Always destroy what is in you.

  Tristan Tzara

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

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Journalism, Understood

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• 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

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Practice, Rivers

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• Thought is made in the mouth.

  Tristan Tzara

  Thinking, Mouths, Made

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

  Tristan Tzara

  Mistake, Made, Made A Mistake

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• Art needs an operation

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Needs, Operations

  Tristan Tzara (1977). “Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries”, Calder Publications Limited

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• 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.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Cutting, Flames

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• 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.)

  Tristan Tzara

  Men, Eggs, Water

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