Best 80 quotes of Antonin Artaud on MyQuotes

Antonin Artaud

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

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

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    Antonin Artaud

    Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

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    Antonin Artaud

    [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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

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    Antonin Artaud

    I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

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

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    Antonin Artaud

    I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

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    Antonin Artaud

    I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

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

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    Antonin Artaud

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

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    Antonin Artaud

    If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.

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    Antonin Artaud

    I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    Life consists of burning up questions.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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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    Antonin Artaud

    [Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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).

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    Antonin Artaud

    Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

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    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    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.

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    Antonin Artaud

    Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

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    Antonin Artaud

    The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

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    Antonin Artaud

    The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.