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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.

Antonin Artaud

We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Feeling Heart Lying Right
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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Abandonment Dreams Fever Law Myself Search
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Character Sex Theatre
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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Asylum Death Insane
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
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Chaos Myself Sarcasm Sink
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
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

Consciousness Day Death Force Necessary Ourselves Philosophy
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
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

Extinct Mindset Slow University Way Wrap
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Asylum Greatness Protect Protection Refusal Society
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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Absence Feeling Myself Present Time Work
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
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
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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Difference Feeling Rich Sensuality Spiritual
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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Art Culture Expression Language Limitation Magic Oneself Shatter Theatre
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
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Cruelty Decision Determination Intention
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
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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Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Break Creation Language Life Order Theatre Touch
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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Death Poet Poetry Reading Worth Writing
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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Death Hold Live Myself Terror
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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Angel Human Live Need Pain Strength Swallow Understand
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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Gravity Mindset Myself Participation Planet Seek Thinking
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
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Drive Experience Kind Liberty Potential Reality Revolution Shake
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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Freedom Moments Myself Refusal
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Beyond Consciousness Finding Man Material Ourselves Wonder

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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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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