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 ARTAUDThe 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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.
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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.
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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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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
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Actors are athletes of the heart.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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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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Those who live, live off the dead.
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This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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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