“Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.”

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.

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

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.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

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.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

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.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

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.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

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.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.

When the world has been unkind, when life’s troubles cloud your mind, Don’t sit down and frown and sigh and moon and mope. Take a walk along the square, fill your lungs with God’s fresh air, Then go whistling back to work and smile and hope.

Heaven always shower His mercy on us and we return it with our cruelty.

Ah, cruel ’tis to love, And cruel not to love, But cruelest of all To love and love in vain.

I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.

Cruel men are the greatest lovers of Mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in other, not in themselves.

While people are struggling unhappily in the cities against the cruel authorities, a waterfall happily and cheerfully flows in the nature; there is happiness only if there is freedom!