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 ARTAUDThe 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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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 cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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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In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
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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.
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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
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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.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
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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.
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I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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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.
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Life consists of burning up questions.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
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The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
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A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
ANTONIN ARTAUD