Top 89 Antonin Artaud Quotes
#1. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#2. I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
Antonin Artaud
#3. I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Antonin Artaud
#5. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#6. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#7. And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.
Antonin Artaud
#8. I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
Antonin Artaud
#9. I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
Antonin Artaud
#11. I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
Antonin Artaud
#12. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#13. 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
#14. Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
#15. The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
Antonin Artaud
#16. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#20. I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
Antonin Artaud
#21. 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 nastiness.
Antonin Artaud
#22. I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Antonin Artaud
#23. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#24. 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
#25. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#26. For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.
Antonin Artaud
#27. I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
Antonin Artaud
#28. I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
Antonin Artaud
#29. No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
#30. It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.
Antonin Artaud
#31. It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
Antonin Artaud
#32. The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.
Antonin Artaud
#33. Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin Artaud
#34. Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination,
Antonin Artaud
#35. All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.
Antonin Artaud
#36. There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel
Antonin Artaud
#37. With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
Antonin Artaud
#38. The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment.
Antonin Artaud
#39. Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is
hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want
to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards
culture.
Antonin Artaud
#40. We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
Antonin Artaud
#41. The cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love.
Antonin Artaud
#42. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#43. Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.
Antonin Artaud
#44. A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt ...
Antonin Artaud
#45. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#50. We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
Antonin Artaud
#51. I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
Antonin Artaud
#52. Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed.
Antonin Artaud
#53. There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
Antonin Artaud
#54. ... not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker)...
Antonin Artaud
#55. When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
Antonin Artaud
#56. And truly
must it be reduced to this stinking gas,
my body?
To say that I have a body
because I have a stinking gas
that forms
inside me?
(To have done with the judgement of God, 1947)
Antonin Artaud
#57. 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
#58. Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
Antonin Artaud
#59. Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.
Antonin Artaud
#60. I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
#61. 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
#62. A host of scorpions crawl out from under the wetnurse's dress and start swarming in her vagina which swells and splits, becomes transparent and shimmers like the sun
Antonin Artaud
#63. When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Antonin Artaud
#64. But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
Antonin Artaud
#65. The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.
Antonin Artaud
#66. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
Antonin Artaud
#67. 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
#68. Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
Antonin Artaud
#69. Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
Antonin Artaud
#70. We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
Antonin Artaud
#71. I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls.
Antonin Artaud
#73. Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
Antonin Artaud
#74. [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.
Antonin Artaud
#75. The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
Antonin Artaud
#76. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#77. 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
#78. This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
Antonin Artaud
#79. I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
Antonin Artaud
#80. Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
Antonin Artaud
#82. 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
#83. 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.
Antonin Artaud
#84. 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
#85. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
#86. All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud
#88. Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
Antonin Artaud
#89. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
Antonin Artaud
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