"From its very beginning, surrealism resisted all attempts to turn it into a doctrine. Instead of teaching a system, the surrealists set out, by means of appropriate actions and productions, to create new demands on reality. They set out to liberate the workings of the subconscious, disrupting conscious thought processes by the use of irrationality and enigma, and exploiting the artistic possibilities of terror and eroticism. In this way they created a new form of sensibility which had a profound influence on modern art, and which was able to meet an enormous range of personal requirements and to find expression in the greatest possible variety of creative processes."

"Unlike romanticism, with which it has often been compared, surrealism was able to establish, between the language of the plastic arts and the language of poetry, a relationship which was not limited to the illustration of the one by the other. It set poetry at the centre of everything, and used art to make poetry into something which could be seen and touched. The surrealist painters and sculptors, moreover, were themselves poets."

"An artist did not necessarily stop being a surrealist when, after having been a part of this common enterprise, he was driven by his individual development to withdraw from it. Any artist who worked with the surrealists acquired, and kept forever, principles and stimuli which he would never have found on his own; for everything, from the passionate diatribes about books down to the games the surrealists played, had the unconditional aim of maintaining the poetic climate."

-- Sarane Alxeandrian, Surrealist Art, 1969 (tr. Gordon Clough)
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