[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 ARTAUDWhen 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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 -
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 -
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Actors are athletes of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
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