Success Quote by Giorgio de Chirico

De Chirico flips the usual hierarchy: dreams aren’t the weirdest thing the mind does. Waking life is. The line reads like a manifesto for Metaphysical painting, where a glove, a statue, an empty piazza, or a length of shadow can feel more charged than any surreal fever dream. He’s not chasing the irrational for its own sake; he’s pointing to a subtler, more unsettling fact: consciousness is a projector. It doesn’t just register reality, it scripts it, varnishes it with mood, dread, nostalgia, prophecy.

The intent is almost tactical. By calling the dream “inexplicable” but declaring ordinary objects even more mysterious, de Chirico licenses the artist to treat the everyday as an engine of enigma. That’s how his work produces its signature hush: a street corner becomes an omen, an arcade becomes a riddle. The subtext is anti-naturalist and anti-psychological in the narrow sense. If meaning isn’t guaranteed by narrative or logic, then painting can abandon “realism” without abandoning truth; it can stage the moment when the world feels slightly ahead of our explanations.

Context matters: de Chirico is writing from early 20th-century Europe, when Freud made dreams fashionable as decoded messages. De Chirico sidesteps the clinic. He’s less interested in interpreting dreams than in noticing that interpretation itself is the deeper mystery. The mind’s power to confer “aspect” turns objects into symbols before we even choose them. That’s the eerie punch: the haunting isn’t in sleep. It’s in perception.