Antonin Artaud Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.

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.

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

Antonin Artaud
Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

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

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.

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
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

Antonin Artaud
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.

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

Antonin Artaud
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

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.

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.

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

Antonin Artaud
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

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.

Antonin Artaud
Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible.

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
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