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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

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Mindset Ourselves Present Skin State
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Burning Call Flame Laughter Myself
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Force Form Imagination Life Magic Observation Ourselves
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Cruelty Decision Strict Theatre
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
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
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
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
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
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Hold Live Myself Terror
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Athlete Heart One Liner
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

Asylum Defend Divine Intellectual Society Trouble
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Enough Life Myself Stage Tragedy
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 cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Follow Language Public Society

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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