Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
ANTONIN ARTAUDThere are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
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.
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 -
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
[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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Life consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Actors are athletes of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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