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Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

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

Act Affirmation Live Myself Reason Risk See Truth
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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Asylum Death Insane
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Culture Expression Language Limitation Magic Oneself Shatter Theatre
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

Conscious Crime Drugs Experience Fundamental Poetry Public War
Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Battle Beginning Eyes Impossible Ourselves Realize Stage Symbol Theatre
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Conversation Hang Morning Myself
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

Consciousness Day Death Force Necessary Ourselves Philosophy
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Athlete Heart One Liner
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

Gravity Mindset Myself Participation Planet Seek Thinking
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destruction Force Image Poetry Relationahip Thrive
Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Bone Culture Fatigue Price Yourself
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Drive Experience Kind Liberty Potential Reality Revolution Shake
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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Death Poet Poetry Reading Worth Writing
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Abandonment Dreams Fever Law Myself Search
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Feeling Heart Lying Right
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Chaos Myself Sarcasm Sink
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Break Creation Language Life Order Theatre Touch
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Language Noise Ruin Theatre Writing
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Artistic Flame Hell Ourselves Time Victim
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.
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Hands Life Man Myself Virtue
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
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Follow Language Public Society
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.
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Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand
If 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.
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Force Form Imagination Life Magic Observation Ourselves
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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Asylum Defend Divine Intellectual Society Trouble
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.
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Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Book Leadership Myself Open Reality Writing

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

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Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

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