A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
ANTONIN ARTAUDThe fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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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.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
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By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will … now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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[defines a madman as] 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.
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Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
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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.
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I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
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Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD