Antonin Artaud Short Quotes

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Where there is a stink of shit
there is a smell of being.

Antonin Artaud
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

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

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

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

Antonin Artaud
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

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

Antonin Artaud
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

Antonin Artaud
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

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

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

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

Antonin Artaud
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination,

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

Antonin Artaud
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

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

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
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

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

Antonin Artaud
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

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