The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
ANTONIN ARTAUDI call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
-
-
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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 -
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.
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 -
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 -
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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 -
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 ARTAUD -
Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD






