[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 ARTAUDAdmittedly 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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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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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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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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Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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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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