Time & Perspective Quote by Andre Breton

Breton’s sentence is a recruitment pitch disguised as a confession: once you’ve tasted a life that isn’t “life in its conventional sense,” you’re basically ruined for normality. That’s not self-help; it’s the hard-sell logic of Surrealism, written with the certainty of someone who believes liberation is less an idea than a physiological event. He frames the break from convention not as a choice you deliberate over, but as an “exaltation” that rewires your thresholds for satisfaction. After that, returning to the old rules isn’t just boring; it’s a kind of betrayal of your own nervous system.

The subtext is that freedom is contagious and irreversible. Breton implies a before-and-after conversion narrative, but he refuses the religious vocabulary; instead he reaches for sensation, for the body’s sudden permission to want more. “Even for a fleeting moment” matters: you don’t need a long apprenticeship in the avant-garde. One glimpse of the world unshackled from bourgeois routine - through dream logic, desire, automatism, revolt - is enough to make the conventional life look like a staged performance you can’t unsee.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the wake of World War I’s mechanized slaughter, Breton and his circle saw “conventional sense” as complicit: a rational, orderly culture that still produced mass graves. Surrealism’s promise was not mere aesthetic novelty but psychic sabotage against that order. The line works because it flatters and threatens at once: you, reader, are the kind of person who can’t go back. It’s a dare with a velvet glove.