[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 ARTAUDIf our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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.
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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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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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
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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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And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
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I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
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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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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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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
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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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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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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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