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 ARTAUDThe actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
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 -
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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 -
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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 -
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 -
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 cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
Life consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD