“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

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.

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.

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.

I myself am an absolute abyss.

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.

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.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

Actors are athletes of the heart.

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.

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

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.

Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I’m hopeful, but very, very concerned.

I don’t have a burning desire to be taken seriously as an actor. I don’t have a master plan in that way.

To truly be of service to others, we must first serve the server. The ability to bring an enlightened presence to those in need is the ability to light a candle without burning ourselves out.

If you see what you do each day as your way of loving the world and helping it heal, then life gets to be a lot different. The difference between burning up and burning out is the difference between loving what you are doing and not loving it.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

Everything was black in the harbor, but there were still some fires burning on the ships.

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

If he were on fire, he couldn’t act as if he were burning. He can’t out-act me on the big screen.