Aging & Wisdom Quote by Salvador Dali

Dali is prescribing a career strategy that doubles as a confession: respect isn’t earned by behaving well, it’s extracted by staging a breach. The “hard kick to the right shin” is cartoon violence, but it’s also perfect social anatomy. You don’t attack society’s heart or head; you jab it where it’s tender, public, and humiliating. The shin is low-status pain, the kind that makes an institution flinch without granting it the dignity of martyrdom. For a young artist, that’s the point: the first move is not mastery but disturbance.

The subtext is nastier than it looks. Dali ties “society that you love” to aggression, implying that genuine attachment comes with the nerve to offend. Love, here, isn’t warm; it’s proprietary. He’s not asking for reform. He’s asking for spectacle: make them notice you, then let their attention congeal into “lasting respect.” That’s a cynical reading of cultural gatekeeping, where scandal functions as an audition.

Then comes the twist: “After that, be a snob.” Dali knows the avant-garde has a shelf life. Once you’ve created the rupture, you stabilize your brand by policing taste, acting like you were always the standard. It’s insurgency followed by aristocracy, rebellion converted into hierarchy.

Context makes it sharper: Dali’s surrealist notoriety, his self-mythologizing, his comfort with commerce and celebrity. He’s outlining the modern artist’s paradox: you become an icon by biting the hand you crave, then wearing the bite mark as a medal.