Antonin Artaud quotes

Antonin Artaud

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
Antonin Artaud
Hell Out Get Except
"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."
Antonin Artaud
Life People Genius Solution
"Those who live, live off the dead."
Antonin Artaud
Who Live Dead Off
"Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones."
Antonin Artaud
Culture Yourself More Your
"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape."
Antonin Artaud
World Hell Men Unhappy
"I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."
Antonin Artaud
Myself Me Morning Time
"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others."
Antonin Artaud
Poetry Way Reading Dead
"It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present."
Antonin Artaud
Work Me Time Feel
"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."
Antonin Artaud
Man Long Try Right
"Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones."
Antonin Artaud
You Culture Yourself Never
"When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach."
Antonin Artaud
Life Never Speak Know
"We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human."
Antonin Artaud
Men Want Literature Must
"A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . ."
Antonin Artaud
Real Calm Kind
"A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . ."
Antonin Artaud
Real Calm Kind
"The actor is an athlete of the heart."
Antonin Artaud
Heart Athlete Actors
"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
Antonin Artaud
Pain Work Writing
"The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre."
Antonin Artaud
Light Order Break Through
"Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all."
Antonin Artaud
Fall Mean Exercise
"I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws."
Antonin Artaud
Dream Law Fever
"To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater."
Antonin Artaud
Order Break Through Theatre
"Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them."
Antonin Artaud
Distance Theatre Danger
"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him."
Antonin Artaud
Depression Ideas Delirium Tremens
"Life consists of burning up questions."
Antonin Artaud
Life Burning
"Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh."
Antonin Artaud
Soul World Rotting
"I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself"
Antonin Artaud
Art Existence Works Of Art
"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us."
Antonin Artaud
Beautiful Reading May
"This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose."
Antonin Artaud
Beautiful True Beauty Sun
"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
Antonin Artaud
Communication Teeth Language
"And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths."
Antonin Artaud
Men Ideas Mad
"All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs."
Antonin Artaud
Writing Pigs People
"We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human."
Antonin Artaud
Men Literature Want
"It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us."
Antonin Artaud
Impact Space Giving
"I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames."
Antonin Artaud
Flames Laughing Burning
"We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary."
Antonin Artaud
Death Long Ago One Day
"Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself."
Antonin Artaud
Moments Excuse Distinction
"Those who live, live off the dead."
Antonin Artaud
"In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds."
Antonin Artaud
Mind Skins States
"I myself am an absolute abyss."
Antonin Artaud
Abyss Absolutes
"The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm."
Antonin Artaud
Lying Believe Men
"The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm."
Antonin Artaud
Lying Believe Men
"Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection."
Antonin Artaud
War Poetry Drug
"There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity."
Antonin Artaud
Mean Soul Humanity
"I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten."
Antonin Artaud
Magic Trying Essentials
"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life."
Antonin Artaud
Tragedy Enough Stage
"I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living."
Antonin Artaud
Truth Dice Affirmation
"I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain."
Antonin Artaud
Pain Angel Years
"So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair."
Antonin Artaud
Mean Men Long
"Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind."
Antonin Artaud
Roots Mind Caves
"The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid."
Antonin Artaud
Order Theatre Passionate

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