"The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot"
About this Quote
Originality is a sacrament in Dali's universe, and repetition is the quickest way to profane it. His line works like a trapdoor: it opens with a courtly compliment to metaphor - the first guy is "obviously a poet" - then drops the floor out from under everyone who treats that metaphor as reusable furniture. Dali isn't really policing romance; he's policing imagination.
The rose comparison is a stand-in for every once-shocking image that gets laundered into a lazy default. What begins as perception ("her cheeks really do bloom like that") calcifies into a prefab phrase you can pull off the shelf. Dali's punch comes from how he escalates the moral judgment: not "unoriginal", not "trite", but "possibly an idiot". It's a deliberately cruel calibration, the kind that makes you laugh and wince because it recognizes how quickly culture turns invention into wallpaper.
Context matters: Dali is a Surrealist brand of one, an artist who lived by the logic of estrangement - taking what seems familiar and making it strange again, or exposing how strange it always was. In that light, the quote is less about women than about the deadening effect of convention. When language ossifies into cliche, it stops seeing; it starts signaling. The subtext is a dare: if you're going to borrow, at least do the work of re-seeing. Otherwise you're not communicating beauty, you're just recycling a password.
The rose comparison is a stand-in for every once-shocking image that gets laundered into a lazy default. What begins as perception ("her cheeks really do bloom like that") calcifies into a prefab phrase you can pull off the shelf. Dali's punch comes from how he escalates the moral judgment: not "unoriginal", not "trite", but "possibly an idiot". It's a deliberately cruel calibration, the kind that makes you laugh and wince because it recognizes how quickly culture turns invention into wallpaper.
Context matters: Dali is a Surrealist brand of one, an artist who lived by the logic of estrangement - taking what seems familiar and making it strange again, or exposing how strange it always was. In that light, the quote is less about women than about the deadening effect of convention. When language ossifies into cliche, it stops seeing; it starts signaling. The subtext is a dare: if you're going to borrow, at least do the work of re-seeing. Otherwise you're not communicating beauty, you're just recycling a password.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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