Salvador Dalí, artist: “Many people don’t make it to eighty because they try for too long to stay forty”

Delving into surrealism is always a challenge due to its inherently transgressive nature. By transforming Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious into visual art, interwar European artists sought to transcend reality by championing the irrational and the dreamlike. The result was one of history’s most brilliant yet elusive avant-garde movements—one that found its ultimate champion in Salvador Dalí, born in Spain, Girona.

To be fair, Dalí was an artist precisely because he was simultaneously everything and nothing at all. He was entirely unique. His intellect, which shaped a deeply eclectic body of work, fused diverse influences only to deconstruct them across his canvases. Because of this, exploring his philosophy can induce a certain sense of vertigo. Take, for instance, his famous observation—one that superficial observers might dismiss as a mere quip: “Many people don’t make it to eighty because they try for too long to stay forty.”

The ‘soft watches’

That single sentence pierces far deeper than biological age. It suggests that people squander vital energy fighting the passage of time, desperately clinging to outdated versions of themselves. Ultimately, it exposes our collective refusal to accept transformation, aging, and life’s inevitable mutations—collapsing the rigid structure of time much like the fluid distortion of his iconic soft watches.

The most authentically Dalí aspect of this observation is its stark, unfiltered truth: to grow old gracefully, one must first accept the reality of aging. Anyone obsessed with freezing themselves in youth will inevitably collide with reality. In other words, desperately trying to remain forty is a futile attempt to deny the passage of time—a profound mistake in the eyes of an artist for whom time, mortality, and transformation were lifelong obsessions.

This philosophy mirrors his masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory. Look closely at those iconic, distorted clocks, and you see time presented as something fluid, deeply subjective, and utterly beyond our control. To Dalí, time was never a rigid, ticking clock, but a relentless force that warps and disfigures everything it touches. Trying to halt its progress isn’t just stubborn; it is a complete illusion.

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