Antonin Artaud Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“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 -
“I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“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 -
“There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“And what is an authentic madman? It is 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. 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. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“Those who live, live off the dead.”
-- Antonin Artaud -
“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 -
“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