Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
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Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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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.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
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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.
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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.
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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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.
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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.
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Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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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.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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Related Authors
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Vincent Van Gogh Painter -
Paul Eluard Poet -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Jerzy Grotowski Theatre Director -
Arthur Rimbaud Poet -
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Constantin Stanislavski Actor -
Anais Nin Author -
Bertolt Brecht Poet -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Vsevolod Meyerhold Theatre Director -
Samuel Beckett Novelist -
Alfred Jarry Writer -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Peter Brook Theatre Director -
Georges Bataille Author -
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