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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

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Hold Live Myself Terror
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Beggar Language Talk True
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Difference Feeling Rich Sensuality Spiritual
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
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
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destruction Force Image Poetry Relationahip Thrive
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Freedom Moments Myself Refusal
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
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
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Born Earth Food Myself People Preference
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
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
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
Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Live One Liner
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Burning Call Flame Laughter Myself
I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Act Affirmation Live Myself Reason Risk See Truth
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
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Cruelty Decision Strict Theatre
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destroy Myself Suicide Togetherness
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

Cleaning Despair Elimination Failure Himself Human Right Try
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

Encouragement Function Hard Ourselves Sleep Wake Up
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
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
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
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Beautiful Direction Lose True
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

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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