The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUDBy 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
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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.
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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 society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.
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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.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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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.
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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.
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All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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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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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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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.
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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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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD