text:
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11 1930 – August 6 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist and an early pioneer in many research areas of computing science. Widely considered as one of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation, Dijkstra helped shape the new discipline from both an engineering and a theoretical perspective.

Quotes by Dijkstra

 * Quotes are arranged in chronological order

1960s

 * For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages.

 * Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and ... our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.
 * Dijkstra (1968) "A Case against the GO TO Statement" cited in: Bill Curtis (1981) Tutorial, human factors in software development. p. 109.

 * Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs
 * Dijkstra (1969) J.N. Buxton and B. Randell, eds, Software Engineering Techniques, April 1970. Report on a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27–31 October 1969. p. 16. Possibly the earliest documented use of the famous quote.

1970s

 * A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.
 * Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 5.

 * When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.
 * Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 6.

 * The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.
 * Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 7.

 * Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
 * Dijkstra (1970) "Notes On Structured Programming" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), corollary at the end.

 * The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
 * Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).

 * Another two years later, in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And, believe it or not, but under the heading "profession" my marriage act shows the ridiculous entry "theoretical physicist"!
 * Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).

 * Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.
 * Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).

 * After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden's office door, asking him whether I could "speak to him for a moment"; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could. One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!
 * Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer (EWD340).

 * Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
 * Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements".

 * Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for "the average programmer" — you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
 * Dijkstra (1975) Comments at a Symposium (EWD 512).

 * Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so-called "powerful" programming languages belong to the solution set rather than to the problem set?
 * Dijkstra (1976) A Discipline of Programming, Prentice-Hall, 1976, p. xiv.

 * Some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.
 * Dijkstra (1976-79) On the foolishness of "natural language programming" (EWD 667)

 * Several people have told me that my inability to suffer fools gladly is one of my main weaknesses.
 * Dijkstra (1978) The pragmatic engineer versus the scientific designer (EWD 690).

 * Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.
 * Dijkstra (1979) My hopes of computing science (EWD 709).

 * For me, the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a teachable discipline: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs. The more you concentrate on these two challenges, the clearer you will see that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable.
 * Dijkstra (1979) My hopes of computing science (EWD 709).

The Humble Programmer (1972)

1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), October 1972: pp. 859–866.

 * As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952, and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country.

 * We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!

 * We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour.

 * The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.

 * FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.

 * LISP has been jokingly described as "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.

 * When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.

 * Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit.

 * If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

 * Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but it is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.
 * Compare more succinct phrasings cited above.

 * The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

 * The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
 * Often misquoted as "The purpose of abstraction..."

How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)
How do we tell truths that might hurt? (numbered EWD498, written 1975) was written as a series of aphorisms, and is the source of several popular quotations. It was also published in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective.

 * The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

 * APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

 * FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

 * In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

 * It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

 * Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

 * Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

 * Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

 * We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession, on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.

 * About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

1980s

 * Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
 * Dijkstra (1982) "A Letter to My Old Friend Jonathan" (EWD475) p. 101 in

 * [Though computer science is a fairly new discipline, it is predominantly based on the Cartesian world view. As Edsgar W. Dijkstra has pointed out] A scientific discipline emerges with the - usually rather slow! - discovery of which aspects can be meaningfully 'studied in isolation for the sake of their own consistency.
 * Dijkstra (1982) as cited in: Douglas Schuler, Douglas Schuler Jonathan Jacky (1989) Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, 1987. Vol 1, p. 84.

 * How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
 * Source: EWD648.

 * I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery.
 * Dijkstra (1984) Source: The threats to computing science (EWD898).

 * The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
 * Dijkstra (1984) The threats to computing science (EWD898).

 * Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
 * Dijkstra (1984) On the nature of Computing Science (EWD896).

 * Probably I am very naive, but I also think I prefer to remain so, at least for the time being and perhaps for the rest of my life.
 * (Referring to his conclusion to the Barber paradox or Russell's paradox.)
 * Dijkstra (1985) Where is Russell's paradox? (EWD 923A).

 * A confusion of even longer standing came from the fact that the unprepared included the electronic engineers that were supposed to design, build and maintain the machines. The job was actually beyond the electronic technology of the day, and, as a result, the question of how to get and keep the physical equipment more or less in working condition became in the early days the all-overriding concern. As a result, the topic became – primarily in the USA – prematurely known as 'computer science' – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as 'knife science' – and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment. Quod non [Latin: "Which is not true"]. We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.
 * Dijkstra (1986) On a cultural gap (EWD 924).

 * When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
 * Dijkstra (1986) Visuals for BP's Venture Research Conference (EWD 963).

 * My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
 * Dijkstra (1988) "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD1036).

 * As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. (...) Software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.
 * Dijkstra (1988) "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD1036).

 * The problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions.
 * Dijkstra (1988) "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD1036).

1990s

 * When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance" (whatever that may be).
 * Dijkstra (1993) "From my Life" (EWD 1166).

 * In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork". For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit". Very.
 * Dijkstra (1994) "The strengths of the academic enterprise" (EWD 1175).

 * I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.
 * Dijkstra (1995) "Introducing a course on calculi" (EWD 1213).

 * A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures.
 * Dijkstra (EWD1239: A first exploration of effective reasoning)

 * It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity.
 * Dijkstra (1996) "The next fifty years" (EWD 1243a).

 * Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.
 * Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.
 * Dijkstra (1999) "Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges" (EWD 1284).

 * May, in spite of all distractions generated by technology, all of you succeed in turning information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.
 * Dijkstra (1998)

2000s

 * The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
 * Dijkstra (2000) "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" (EWD 1305).

 * It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
 * Dijkstra (2000), "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" (EWD 1305).

 * There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript and it was 'aus einem Guss' (from one cast). In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page. In one place he did this nine times. When they peeled them, the last version proved identical to the first one.
 * Dijkstra (2001) Source: Denken als discipline, a program from Dutch public TV broadcaster VPRO from April 10th, 2001 about Dijkstra

 * What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in '59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.
 * Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)

Unknown date

 * In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......
 * This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!
 * Dijkstra, "On the reliability of programs" (EWD 303).

Quotes about Dijkstra

 * The precious gift that this Turing Award acknowledges is Dijkstra's style: his approach to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; his eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correct, not just debugged into correctness; and his illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design.
 * M.D. Mcllroy (1972) at the presentation of the lecture on August 14, 1972, at the ACM Annual Conference in Boston, cited in E.G. Dijkstra (1972) "The Humble Programmer". 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture. in: Communications of the ACM 15 (10), October 1972: pp. 859–866.

 * A revolution is taking place in the way we write programs and teach programming, because we are beginning to understand the associated mental processes more deeply. It is impossible to read the recent [E. W. Dijkstra, O.-J. Dahl, and C. A. R. Hoare] book Structured Programming, without having it change your life. The reason for this revolution and its future prospects have been aptly described by E.W. Dijkstra in his 1972 Turing Award Lecture, The Humble Programmer.
 * Donald Knuth (1974), in Structured Programming with Go To Statements. (Computing Surveys 6 (4): 261–301).

 * The working vocabulary of programmers everywhere is studded with words originated or forcefully promulgated by E. W. Dijkstra—display, deadly embrace, semaphore, go-to-less programming, structured programming. But his influence on programming is more pervasive than any glossary can possibly indicate.
 * David Gries (1978), in Programming Methodology: A Collection of Articles by Members of IFIP WG2.3 (New York: Springer Verlag), p. 7.

 * Edsger W. Dijkstra's 1969 "Structured Programming" article precipitated a decade of intense focus on programming techniques that has fundamentally altered human expectations and achievements in software development. Before this decade of intense focus, programming was regarded as a private, puzzle-solving activity of writing computer instructions to work as a program. After this decade, programming could be regarded as a public, mathematics-based activity of restructuring specifications into programs. Before, the challenge was in getting programs to run at all, and then in getting them further debugged to do the right things. After, programs could be expected to both run and do the right things with little or no debugging. Before, it was common wisdom that no sizable program could be error-free. After, many sizable programs have run a year or more with no errors detected. These expectations and achievements are not universal because of the inertia of industrial practices. But they are well-enough established to herald fundamental change in software development.
 * Harlan Mills (1986). Structured Programming: Retrospect and Prospect. (IEEE Software 3(6): 58-66, November 1986)

 * The difference between a computer programmer and a computer scientist is a job-title thing. Edsgar Dijkstra wants proudly to be called a "computer programmer," although he hasn't touched a computer now for some years. (...) His great strength is that he is uncompromising. It would make him physically ill to think of programming in C++.
 * Donald Knuth (1996), in an interview by Jack Woehr of Dr. Dobb's Journal.

 * You probably know that arrogance, in computer science, is measured in nanodijkstras.
 * Alan Kay, keynote speech at OOPSLA 1997 (video).

 * ...I also discovered books of two great computer scientists from whose work I learned the scientific foundation of my trade: Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra. Knuth taught me the answers. Dijkstra taught me the questions. Time and time again I come back to their works for new insights.
 * Alexander Stepanov (1997), in an interview with Graziano Lo Russo of Edizioni Infomedia srl.

 * The first classic is one of the great works in computer programming: E. W. Dijkstra, Cooperating Sequential Processes (1965). Here Dijkstra lays the conceptual foundation for abstract concurrent programming.
 * Per Brinch Hansen, in The Origin of Concurrent Programming: From Semaphores to Remote Procedure Calls (Springer, 2002)

 * The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is named for Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002), a pioneer in the area of distributed computing. His foundational work on concurrency primitives (such as the semaphore), concurrency problems (such as mutual exclusion and deadlock), reasoning about concurrent systems, and self-stabilization comprises one of the most important supports upon which the field of distributed computing is built. No other individual has had a larger influence on research in principles of distributed computing. The prize is given for outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing have been evident for at least a decade.
 * Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing), the citation for the prize

 * Most experienced IT professionals will agree that developing and adhering to a standard architecture is key to the success of large-scale software development. Computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra validated this notion when he developed THE operating system in 1968. Since then, layered architectures have proved their viability in technological domains, such as hardware and networking. Layering has proved itself in the operating system domain; however, the same benefits are available when applied to e-commerce or to thin client–oriented applications. Layered architectures have become essential in supporting the iterative development process by promoting reusability, scalability, and maintainability.
 * Kyle Brown, Gary Craig, Greg Hester et al. (2003). Enterprise Java Programming with IBM WebSphere, 2nd Edition (IBM Press), p. 5

 * Edsger Dijkstra, one of the giants of our field and a passionate believer in the mathematical view of programs and programming (...) Over the previous quarter-century, he had formulated many of the great intellectual challenges of the field as programming—the goto statement, structured programming, concurrent processes, semaphores, deadlocks, recursive programming in Algol, and deriving correct programs.
 * Peter J. Denning, former ACM president, in The Field of Programmers Myth (Communications of the ACM, 47 (7) pp. 15-20, 2004)

 * Of great influence to Pascal was Structured Programming, put forth by E. W. Dijkstra. This method of proceeding in a design would obliviously be greatly encouraged by the use of a Structured Language, a language with a set of constructs that could freely be combined and nested. The textual structure of a program should directly reflect its flow of control.
 * Niklaus Wirth, in Impact of Software Engineering Research on Modern Programming Languages (ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Vol. 14, No. 4, October 2005, p. 431-477)

 * In 1965 Dijkstra wrote his famous Notes on Structured Programming and declared programming as a discipline in contrast to a craft. Also in 1965 Hoare published an important paper about data structuring. These ideas had a profound influence on new programming language, in particular Pascal. Languages are the vehicles in which these ideas were to be expressed. Structured programming became supported by a structured programming language.
 * Niklaus Wirth, in A Brief History of Software Engineering (IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol.30, no. 3, July–September 2008, p. 32-39)

 * The notion of the concurrent program as a means for writing parallel programs without regard for the underlying hardware was first introduced by Edsger Dijkstra (1968). Moti Ben-Ari (1982) elegantly summed up Dijkstra's idea in three sentences: 'Concurrent programming is the name given to programming notation and techniques for expressing potential parallelism and solving the resulting synchronization and communication problems. Implementation of parallelism is a topic in computer systems (hardware and software) that is essentially independent of concurrent programming. Concurrent programming is important because it provides an abstract setting in which to study parallelism without getting bogged down in the implementation details.'
 * John W. McCormick, Frank Singhoff, Jérôme Hugues (2011). Building Parallel, Embedded, and Real-Time Applications with Ada (Cambridge University Press), p. 5

 * The revolution in views of programming started by Dijkstra's iconoclasm led to a movement known as structured programming, which advocated a systematic, rational approach to program construction. Structured programming is the basis for all that has been done since in programming methodology, including object-oriented programming. As the first book on the topic [Structured Programming by Dijkstra, Ole-Johan Dahl, and Tony Hoare] shows, structured programming is about much more than control structures and the goto. Its principal message is that programming should be considered a scientific discipline based on mathematical rigor.
 * Bertrand Meyer (2009), in Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts. (Springer), p. 188.

 * Since the early work of E.W. Dijkstra (1965), who introduced the mutual exclusion problem, the concept of a process, the semaphore object, the notion of a weakest precondition, and guarded commands (among many other contributions), synchronization is no longer a catalog of tricks but a domain of computing science with its own concepts, mechanisms, and techniques whose results can be applied in many domains. This means that process synchronization has to be a major topic of any computer science curriculum.
 * Michel Raynal (2013), in Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles, and Foundations (Springer), p. vi.

 * Although Dijkstra will always be remembered for structured programming, and for his style and approach, he also invented many other of the standard ideas of programming. If you are struggling with multi-threaded programming you may have encountered the semaphore, and the idea of the "deadly embrace". These, and more, are the result of Dijkstra's work on concurrent programming. He showed how this particularly difficult area of programming could be made relatively safe.
 * Mike James (2013), in Edsger Dijkstra - The Poetry of Programming, by website i-programmer.info

 * While concurrent program execution had been considered for years, the computer science of concurrency began with Edsger Dijkstra's seminal 1965 paper that introduced the mutual exclusion problem. (...) The first scientific examination of fault tolerance was Dijkstra's seminal 1974 paper on self-stabilization. (...) The ensuing decades have seen a huge growth of interest in concurrency—particularly in distributed systems. Looking back at the origins of the field, what stands out is the fundamental role played by Edsger Dijkstra, to whom this history is dedicated.
 * Leslie Lamport, in Turing Lecture: The Computer Science of Concurrency: The Early Years (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 58 No. 6, June 2015)

 * We generally trace the idea of building computer systems in layers back to a 1967 paper that the Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra gave to a joint IEEE Computer Society/ACM conference. Prior to this paper, engineers had struggled with the problem of how to organize software. If you look at early examples of programs, and you can find many in the electronic library of the Computer Society, you will find that most code of that era is complicated, difficult to read, hard to modify, and challenging to reuse. In his 1967 paper, Dijkstra described how software could be constructed in layers and gave an example of a simple operating system that used five layers. He admitted that this system might not be a realistic test of his ideas but he argued that the "larger the project, the more essential the structuring!" The idea of using layers to control complexity has become a mainstay of software architecture. We see it in many forms and apply it to many problems. We see it in the hierarchy of classes in object-oriented programming and in the structure of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a relatively recent application of layering in computer science. It was articulated in 2007 as a means of controlling complexity in business systems, especially distributed systems that make substantial use of the Internet. Like Dijkstra's plan for system development, its layering system is called the SOA Solution Stack or S3. The S3's nine layers are: 1) operational systems, 2) service components, 3) services, 4) business processes, 5) consumer actions, 6) system integration, 7) quality control and assurance, 8) information architecture, and 9) system governance and policies.
 * David Alan Grier, in Closer Than You Might Think: Layers upon Layers. (IEEE Computer Society)

Disputed

 * Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
 * Possibly folklore. See Computer science.

Misattributed

 * Go To statement considered harmful
 * Dijkstra sent a paper to Communications of the ACM under the title of "A Case against the GO TO Statement" (EWD215, PDF here). However the editor Niklaus Wirth decided to publish it as a letter to the editor to speed up publication. Wirth changed the title to "The goto statement considered harmful". Dijkstra explains it himself in EWD1308 (see near the end of the article).

title: Edsger W. Dijkstra


text:
Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989) was a Spanish surrealist artist, born in Catalonia, Spain. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work and his exceptional way of life and expression.

Quotes of Salvador Dali

 * chronologically arranged, after date of Dali's quotes

1920 - 1930

 * Telephone, pedal washbasin, white refrigerators gleaming with Ripolin [French paint], bidet, small phonograph.. ..objects of authentic and pure poetry (MPC p. 11)..  ..The Parthenon was not built as a ruin. It was built on a new surface without patina, like our automobiles. / we will not always bear on our shoulders the weight of our father's corpse.
 * Quote, 1920's; MPC p. 13; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 28

 * Just now I'm painting a beautiful woman, smiling, burnt to a crisp, with feathers of all colors, held up by a small die of burning marble; the die is in turn held up by a little puff of smoke, churned and quite; in the sky there are asses with parrot-heads, grasses and beach sand, all about to explode, all clean, incredible objective..
 * Quote in Dali's letter to his art-friend Lorca, 1927; as quoted in Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War, Robin Adèle Greeley, p. 67
 * Dali is striving then for a rational approach of his paintings; he is very probably referring to his painting, he made earlier in 1927: 'Little Ashes'

 * The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved.. .In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass..  .I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry.
 * Quote from his poem 'Sant Sebastia', Salvador Dali 1927 - dedicated to the Spanish poet Lorca; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 46

 * One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.
 * Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48

 * So, André Breton, if tonight I dream I am screwing you, tomorrow morning I will paint all of our best fucking positions with the greatest wealth of detail.
 * Quote, early 1930's; as quoted by Jonathan Jones in his article 'André in wonderland'; The Guardian / Culture, 16 June, 2004
 * In the early 1930's Dalí was judged by a surrealist 'high court' at André Breton's flat; Dali was accused of 'counter-revolutionary actions' because of his supposed political sympathy for fascism. Dalí claimed that he was being an honest and pure surrealist, recording the unexpurgated contents of his psychic life - which this quote should illustrate.

1931 - 1940

 * One might think that through ecstasy we would have access to a world as far from reality as that of the dream. – The repugnant can become desirable, affection cruelty, the ugly beautiful, faults qualities, qualities black miseries.
 * Quote in 'Le phénomene de l'extase', in 'Minotaure' 1933; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 133

 * The Italian metaphysical movement [initiated by De Chirico ] started from the spiritual reality, a consequence of the physical miracle and it aspects grouped on an immaterial plane; all this formed a new spectral reality, in order to attain maximal, almost erotic creativity in touch. The Cubists, on the other hand, starting from this sensual-idealistic touch, found a pure, new form of spirituality. Lorca is one of those who have reached this new form of miracle by following the paths of the greatest incredulity. He does not even believe in his own hands, unless it be to turn one-legged physiological and abstract tables.
 * Quote from Dali's 'Introduction' of the exhibition of drawings, made by Lorca, 1930's (MPC 3); as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 152

 * It is under such cultural circumstances that our contemporaries, systematically cretinised by the mechanicism and the architecture of auto-punition, by psychological bureaucratic congratulations, by ideological disorder and imaginative fasting, by affective paternal hungers of all kinds, seek in vain - to bite into the doting and triumphal sweetness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militarist and territorial hack of some hitlerian nurse, in order at last to be able, no matter how, to communicate with the totemic consecrated host that has just been elevated in front of their own noses and which, as is known and understood, was nothing else than the spiritual and symbolic nourishment that catholicism offered during the centuries to appease the cannibal frenzy of moral and irrational hungers.
 * Quote from from: Dalí's essay, 1935: Conquest of the Irrational - Chapter: The Waters in which we Swim; Julien Levi Publisher, New York, 1935. p. 8

'My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935

 * Quotes from: Dali's essay: Conquest of the Irrational - Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle'; publisher Julien Levi, New York, 1935

 * It seems to me perfectly obvious when my enemies, my friends and the public in general pretend not to understand the meaning of the images that arise arid that I transcribe in my pictures, How can you expect then to understand them when I myself, who am their "maker", understand them as little?
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 11

 * The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 11-12

 * My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision. - In order that the world of the imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident.. ..as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality. - The important thing is what one wishes to communicate: the concrete irrational subject. - The means of pictorial expression are placed at the service of this subject.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 12

 * In the degree that the images of concrete irrationality approach phenomenal reality, the corresponding means of expression approach those of the great realist painters - Velasquez and Vermeer of Delft - to paint realistically according to irrational thought, according to the unknown imagination.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 12-13

 * Surrealism in its first period offered specific methods for approaching the images of concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusively passive and receptive role of the surrealist subject, are now [1935] in liquidation and giving place to new surrealist methods of systematic exploration of the irrational.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 13

 * The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 14-15

 * It was in 1929 that Salvador Dali [Dali is writing about himself] brought his attention to hear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations proper to paranoia; this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which hears the name of "paranoiac-critical activity". Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 15

 * It is a question of the systematic and interpretive organization of the sensational, scattered and narcissist surrealist experimental material, - that is to say, of everyday surrealist events:,br>nocturnal pollution, false recollection, dream, diurnal fantasy, the concrete transformation of nocturnal phosphene into a hypnagogic image or of "waking phosphene" into an objective image, - the nutritive caprice, - inter-uterine claims, - anamorphic hysteria, - the voluntary retention of the urine, - the involuntary retention of insomnia - the fortuitous image of exclusively exhibitionist tendency, -the incomplete action, - the frantic manner, - the regional sneeze, the anal wheelbarrow, the minimal mistake, the liliputian malaise, the super-normal physiological state, - the picture one leaves off painting, that which one paints, the territorial ringing of the telephone, "the deranging image", etc., etc., all these things, I say, and a thousand other instantaneous or successive sollicitations, revealing a minimum of irrational intentionalety or, on the contrary, a minimum of suspect phenomenal nullity, are associated, by the mechanisms of paranoiac-critical activity, in an indestructible delirious-interpretive system of political problems, paralytic images, more or less mammiferous questions, playing the role of the obsessing idea.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 15-16

 * Paranoiac-critical activity is an organizing and productive force of objective chance. Paranoiac-critical activity no longer considers surrealist phenomena and images by themselves but, on the contrary, as a coherent whole of systematic and significant relations.
 * Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', p. 16

1941 - 1950

 * We know today that form is always the product of an inquisitorial process of matter – the specific reaction of matter when subjected to the terrible coercion of space choking it on all sides, pressing and squeezing it out, producing the swellings that burst form it life to the exact limits of the rigorous contours of its own originality of reaction.
 * Quote, in the 'Introduction' of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 2

 * Having reached the surface [in the Paris' Metro] I remained crazed for a long time, gathering my spirits. I had the impression that I had been vomited by a monstrous anus after being tumultuously brewed by an intestine. I did not know where I was; as though spat out on to unknown land, a pointless little excrement.. .And, a miracle!..  .This shock was a beneficial revelation. One must at every opportunity use the subterranean paths of action and thought, erase the traces, appear suddenly and irrelevantly, endless conquer oneself, never hesitate to sodomize one's soul so that it will be reborn purer and stronger than ever.
 * Quote from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali - first publication in 1942 - Vision Press, London 1976, p. 210

 * From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind.
 * Quote from Secret Life; as quoted in La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, S. Dali. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 597

 * In that privileged place, reality and the sublime dimension almost come together. My mystical paradise begins in the plains of the Empordà, is surrounded by the Alberes hills, and reaches plenitude in the bay of Cadaqués. This land is my permanent inspiration. The only place in the world, too, where I feel loved. When I painted that rock that I entitled 'The Great Masturbator', I did nothing more than render homage to one of the promontories of my kingdom, and my painting was a hymn to one of the jewels of my crown.
 * Quote from Wikipedia: The Great Masturbator

 * It ['The Great Masturbator', 1929] represented a large head, yellow like wax, with very red cheeks, long eyelashes and an imposing nose compressed against the ground. This face had no mouth, and in place of the mouth an enormous lobster was hooked. The lobster's belly was decomposing and full of ants. Some of these ants were scurrying through the space that would have been occupied by the non-existent mouth of the great anguished face, whose head ended in 1900-style architecture and ornamentation. The title of the painting was The Great Masturbator.
 * Quote from La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 648

 * What is an elegant woman? An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and who has no hair under her arms.
 * In The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí - first publication in 1942

 * Surrealism will at least have served to give experimental proof that total sterility and attempts at automatizations have gone too far and have led to a totalitarian system.. .Today's laziness and the total lack of technique have reached their paroxysm in the psychological signification of the current use of the college [= collage].
 * Quote from the catalog, 1943, of Dali's exhibition at the Knoedler Gallery in New York; as quoted on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
 * Dali attacked here some frequently-used Surrealist techniques

 * Bread has always been one of the oldest subjects of fetishism and obsession in my work, the first and the one to which I have remained the most faithful. I painted the same subject 19 years ago 'Basket of Bread, 1929'. By making a very careful comparison of the two pictures, everyone can study all the history of painting right there, from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.
 * Dali's quote, 1945; as cited by R. Descharnes (1985), in Salvador Dalí. Abrams. p. 94. ISBN 0-8109-0830-1
 * Dali just finished his second painting 'Basket of Bread, 1945'
 * Myself at the age of six, when I believed I was a little girl, raising with a very great care the skin of the sea in order to observe a dog sleeping in the shadow of the water.
 * title of his oil-painting, Dali painted in 1950

 * In the first place, in 1950, I had a 'cosmic dream' in which I saw this image in colour and which in my dream represented the 'nucleus of the atom.' This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it 'the very unity of the universe,' the Christ!
 * inscription, 1950; on the bottom of his studies for the painting 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'; as quotes by Robert Descharnes, Dalí. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003.
 * Dalí explained his inspiration for the painting 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'

1951 - 1960

 * In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.
 * Quote from Dali's lecture, 1951 'Pablo Picasso et moi', (MPC 65)

 * The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth.. .My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens.
 * Quote from a review of Dali's exhibition at the Carstairs Gallery; 'The New Yorker', 20 December, 1952 p. 24
 * Dali is referring to one of his exhibited paintings there, very probably 'The Madonna of Port Lligat'

 * Every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí.
 * quote of 1953; as cited in Smithsonian magazine. Variants: Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today? Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dalí.

 * In the Surrealist period, I wanted to create the iconography of the interior world and the world of the marvelous, of my father Freud. Today, the exterior world and that of physics has transcended the one of psychology. My father today is Dr. Heisenberg.
 * Quote from his Anti-Matter Manifesto, 1958; as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali

 * When I have at last become like a statue through the exacerbation of my ego which has led me to this ultimate sclerosis.. .Then and only then will I at last be able to set this statue up and come out of myself into the crowd to go and see the world. No one will notice anything because they will all be looking at the statue and I will be able to go about, free at last..  .It's then that I shall realize my eternal dream: to become a newspaper reporter!
 * Quote in 'The Dali News', Dimanche 27 November 1960, Salvador Dali; as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 163-164

 * Popularity, even at its most mediocre, delights me.. .I behave nicely with the public, out of the same concern for prudence that makes me generous in cases of epidemics or other collective calamities..  .Beware, I tell myself, because you may be judged at the end of the time, if there is an end of time and a judge..  .Beware of the day when no one ask you for anything anymore, be nice with the cratinization of advertising..  .Any reflection of my existence in others clams my worries about the feeble degree of reality of things, the world and myself. It's from all these eyes, in which I see myself seen, that I take my substance..  ..but where is substance? If it is not in nature it can't be in God..  .In a reality that endlessly disperses before the eye, fades away between our fingers, the only really material matter, the only really substantial substance, would be God.
 * Quote from (MPC 3); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 167

 * Let us watch this de Kooning [leading Abstract-Expressionist painter in New York] with his prematurely white hair making his great sleepwalker's movements, as though he was waiting in a dream to open bays of Biscay, to explode islands like pieces of orange or Parma violets, to tear continents from a cerulean blue split by oceans of Naples yellow.. ..if by good or by ill fortune, in the middle of this Dionysian demiurg the image of The Eternal Feminine should appear.. the least that might have happened to her would be that she should emerge (from all this chaos) wearing nothing but a little make-up.
 * Dali's comment on the 'Woman-paintings', c. 1960 [a.o. Woman-III ] of the American abstract-expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: (MPC 75); as cited in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, (translated by Trista Selous), Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 135

1961 - 1970

 * Let us illuminate my political positions. I have always been against any affiliation.. .I am the only Surrealist who always refused to be part of any organization whatsoever. I was never a Stalinist, nor fooled by any association. Illustrious members of the Falange [Spanish ultra-right wing] I never got involved..  .If I accepted the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic from Franco's [Spanish fascist dictator] hands, it is because in Soviet Russia I was not awarded the Lenin Prize.
 * Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997

 * Men who fuck easily, and can give themselves without difficulty, have only a very diminished creative potency.. .Look at Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Napoleon, they all left their mark on their times, and they were more or less impotent.
 * Quote from Entretiens avec Salvador Dali, Alain Bosquet, 1966; as cited in The shameful life of Salvador Dali, Ian Gibson, New York / London, Norton & Co, 1997

 * Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
 * Quote from Dali by Dali (1970), as cited in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2012), p. 737

Diary of a Genius (1964)

 * Quotes of Dali from: Diary of a Genius (1964), Creation Books, 1998

 * Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.
 * p. 1

 * Democratic governments are not suited to the publication of the thunderous revelations I am in the habit of making. The unpublished parts will appear later.. ..when Europe will have restored its traditional monarchies.
 * p. 2

 * I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.
 * pp. 5-6

 * I categorically refused to consider the surrealists as just another literary and artistic group. I believed they were capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the 'practical, rational world'. I was going to become the Nietzsche of the irrational. I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the 'conquest of the irrational'. In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.
 * p. 9

 * This book ['Diary of a Genius', by Dali] will prove that that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.
 * p. 11 - in: the 'Prologue' of The Diary of a Genius

 * It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
 * p. 12

 * Someone like myself, who claimed to be a real madman, living and organized with a Pythagorean precision..
 * p. 17

 * Surrealism in its early period offered specific methods to bring images closer to concrete irrationality. These methods, based on the exclusive passive and receptive role of the 'surrealist subject', are bankrupt and are giving way to new surrealist methods for the systematic exploration of the irrational.. .The new delirious images of concrete irrationality suggest their physical, real 'possibility'; they go beyond the domain of psycho-analysable fantasies and 'virtual' representations..  .Against the dream memory and impossible, virtual images of purely receptive states that one can only recount, the physical facts of 'objective' irrationality with which one can already hurt oneself.
 * p. 23 - on new Surrealism techniques and methods.

 * Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
 * p. 26

 * The anagram 'Avida Dollars' was a talisman for me [referring to 'Divine Dali', so called by André Breton ]. It rendered the rain of dollars fluid, sweet and monotonous. Someday I shall tell the whole truth about the way in which this blessed disorder of Danae was garnered. It will be a chapter of a new book, probably my masterpiece: On the Life of Salvador Dali, considered as a Work of Art [never written].
 * p. 35

 * Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
 * p. 42

 * Don't be afraid of perfection. You will never attain it!
 * p. 44

 * July 1952/the 27th/This morning an exceptional defecation: two small turds in the shape of a rhinoceros horns. Such a scanty stool worries me. I would have thought the champagne, so alien to my routine, would have had a laxative effect. (DG p. 59)
 * - the 29th/Because of a very long fart, really a very long, and let us be frank, melodious fart, that I produced when I woke up, I was reminded of Michel de Montaigne. (DG p. 60)
 * - September 1952/the2nd/Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional, smooth and odourless.
 * pp. 59 – 64

 * And man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.
 * p. 65 (Dali's remark, in 1952)

 * I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.
 * p. 79

 * If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.
 * p. 81

 * Begin by drawing and painting like the old masters. After that do as you see fit - you will always be respected.
 * p. 82

 * Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love.
 * p. 126 In: L'amour; as quoted in Dali and Me.

 * It is with Millet's 'Angelus' that I associate all the pre-twilight and twilight memories of my childhood, regarding them as the most delirious, in other words (commonly speaking) poetic.. .Most frequently, at the end of summer days, I would leave the streets of the town and go to the fields to listen to the sounds of insects and plunge into infinite reveries.
 * p. 126 - (MTA), youth memories as a young boy, living in Spain

 * 'Up there!'. Wonderful words! All my life has been dominated by these antagonisms: high and low. In my childhood I tried desperately to be high up.
 * - There was nothing left between me and the void. I must have spent several minutes lying on my stomach with my eyes closed to resist its almost invincible attraction.
 * - Most of my readers will have felt the sensation of suddenly falling into the void, just at the point when sleep is going to take them over completely. Waking up with a start, your heart convulsively trembling, you don't always realize that this sensation of vertigo is a reminiscence of the expulsion of being born.. .All those who throw themselves into the void have at bottom only one desire, to be reborn at any price.
 * pp. 131-132 - (VSD), Dali's quotes on the void

 * Where is the real? All appearance are deceitful, the visible surface is deceptive. I look at my hand.. .It is nerves, muscles, bones. Let us go deeper: it is molecules and acids. Further still: it is an impalpable waltz of electrons and neutrons. Further still: an immaterial nebula. Who can prove that my hand exists?
 * pp. 133-134 - (VSD)

 * It is difficult to hold the world's interest for more than half an hour at a time.. .I have been successful for twenty years, to the extent that papers publish the most incomprehensible new items of our time, sent by teletype: PARIS. Dali gave lecture at Sorbonne on Vermeer's paintings 'lacemaker' and the rhinoceros..  ..NEW YORK. Dali landed in New York dressed in a golden space-suit.
 * p. 171

 * Surrounded by countless people who murmur my name and call me 'maître', I am about to inaugurate the exhibition of my one hundred illustrations of the Divine Comedy at the Galliera Museum.
 * p. 189 - Prologue

1971 - 1980

 * Le Surréalisme, c'est moi.
 * I am Surrealism.
 * Quote in Salvador Dali : Master of Surrealism and Modern Art (1971) by George Cevasco, p. 13

 * Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
 * Quote from People, 27 September 1976

 * Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards.. .To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that.
 * Quote in an interview, published in 'Playboy', 1976

'Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali'

 * Quotes from: Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, André Parinaud (1973)

 * The pleasure of the flesh can be fulfilled only if a particular dimension is created, a kind of stereoscopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as real as reality.. .I need all these suddenly present images of my past that forms the fabric of my entire life.
 * p. unknown

 * My supreme game is to imagine myself dead, devoured by worms. I close my eyes and, with incredible details of absolute, scatological precision, I see myself being slowly eaten and digested by an infernal swarm of large greenish maggots gorging themselves on my flesh.
 * p. 12

 * But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.
 * as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 17

 * Death is the thing I am most afraid of, and the resurrection of the flesh, a great Spanish theme, is the one that it is hardest for me to accept, from the point of view of.. ..life.
 * p. 22

 * ..the paint marks [in Impressionist paintings] placed apparently without order and which suddenly became magnificently ordered if one knew how to make the right distance.. ..to communicate a deep, sun-drenched image of a stream, landscape or face..  ..My eyes were popping out of my head.
 * as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 42

 * Shit scared them [the Surrealists]. Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I know I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the [Surrealist] group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contradictions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.
 * as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 113

 * I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema.. .I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.
 * p. unknown

Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

 * Quotes of Dali: from an interview by Victor Bockris in 1974; as cited in Exposure, Oct. 1990

 * In the subconscious you fuck ugly people, never beautiful, because the libido always desires something repulsive.

 * I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning'!

 * You know the worst thing is freedom. Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity. You know, Dalí spent two months in jail in Spain, and these two months were the most enjoyable and happy in my life. Before my jail period, I was always nervous, anxious. I didn't know if I should make a drawing, or perhaps make a poem, or go to the movies or the theater, or catch a girl, or play with the boys. The people put me in jail, and my life became divine. Tremendous!

 * Ah, UNESCO is the most garbage. Any kind of organization for the good will of the people is impossible. It is necessary for the contrary. Young people need plenty of difficulties to achieve something, you know? If you receive a little money for this, a little money for that, everything becomes mediocre, and collapses ig-no-min-i-ously!

1981 - 1989

 * I don't do drugs. I am drugs.
 * Originally spoken as "Yo no he tomado nunca ninguna droga, como ustedes saben, ni alcohol. Ni marihuana. Nada, nada que. Agua mineral es lo máximo que puedo tomar. Pero, Dalí es la droga. O sea, ustedes pueden tómenme, porque soy alucinógeno."
 * ("I have never taken any drugs, as you know, nor alcohol. Nor marijuana. Nothing. Mineral water is the most that I can take. But, Dalí is the drug. Or, as it were, you can take me, because I am hallucinogenic.")
 * In an interview conducted by Paloma Chamorro in Madrid (Spain), 1982; cited in Salvador Dalí: a la conquista de lo irracional, Javier Pérez Andújar (2003) p. 245 as "Yo no tomo drogas, yo soy la droga." ("I don't take drugs, I am the drug."); viewable in the documentary Revelando a Dalí at 00:01:35

 * 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.
 * Quote from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1987) by Pierre Cabanne, in a preface written by Dalí in January 1968 and translated by Albert Field, p. 13

 * I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that each outline of a rock, / and / of the beaches of Cadaques [in North-Spain, where Dali spent his childhood], each of the geological anomalies of its landscape and its unique light I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of my erotic-emotional life.
 * Quote from the catalog of the exhibition 'Dali una vida de libro', Bibliotheca de Catalunya, Barcelona 2004
 * Dali's memory is written in a mixture of French and Catalan accent

 * When you are a genius, you do not have the right to die, because we are necessary for the progress of humanity..
 * Quote, early January 1986, in: 'El País, Dalí vuelve a casa', 17 July 1986: as cited on Wikipedia: Salvador Dali
 * Dali was returned to the Teatro-Museo and on his return he made his last public appearance. He was taken in a wheelchair to a room where press and TV were waiting and made this brief public statement

Miscellaneous

 * The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
 * Quote from Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small, Roger Rothman, 2012 UNP-Nebraska.

Quotes about Salvador Dalí

 * chronologically arranged, after date of the quotes about Dali

 * Dali has endowed Surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiaccritical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis.
 * Quote of Andre Breton, in his lecture given at Brussels, June 1934; as cited in Salvador Dali, Conquest of the Irrational, Julien Levi Publisher, New York, 1935. p. 7

 * What a wonderful thing it is for an artist [Dali] to find exactly the right wife [Gala] for him. This must only happen once in a hundred times only. It has happened to Dali and I think it is going to make the entire difference to his career - in fact all the difference between him remaining an interesting phenomenon of a distorted decade or in him becoming one of the two or three leading figures of the coming age.
 * Quote of poet/collector Edward James, in a letter, 1935 to a friend; as cited on the website of the Dali museum: page Gala

 * I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate.
 * Quote of Sigmund Freud, in a letter to novelist Stefan Zweig, after meeting in London in 1939. Reported in foreword to The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

 * The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents. Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.
 * Quote of J. G. Ballard, in 'Introduction' to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí

 * Divine Dali!
 * Quote of André Breton, taken from the prologue of Diary of a Genius, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 35

 * Surprisingly, Dalí said that his soft watches [in his painting 'The Persistence of Memory', 1931 were not inspired by the theory of relativity, but by the surrealist perception of a Camembert cheese melting in the sun. The painter insisted on this explanation in his reply letter to Prigogine, who took it as Dalí's reaction to Einstein's coldly mathematical theory.
 * Quote from Wikipedia; source: Salvador Dali (2008). 'The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius' (DVD). Media 3.14-TVC-FGSD-IRL-AVRO

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Salvador Dalí