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[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

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 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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Hands Life Man Myself Virtue
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Born Earth Food Myself People Preference
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Body Desperate Destroy Soul World Yourself
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Escape Forever Hell Man World
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Breathe Leaving Mindset Ourselves Surrender Time
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Feeling Heart Lying Right
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

Absence Feeling Myself Present Time Work
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 ARTAUD

Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Encouragement Function Hard Ourselves Sleep Wake Up
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
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

Cleaning Despair Elimination Failure Himself Human Right Try
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Angel Human Live Need Pain Strength Swallow Understand
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Design Direction Introduction Myself Nature Reality Suicide Tendency
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
The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Language Noise Ruin Theatre Writing

[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.

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[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.

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Popular Authors

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