Antonin Artaud quotes - page 2

Antonin Artaud was a French dramatist, poet, and theater director, celebrated for his radical ideas about theater. His "Theatre of Cruelty" concept profoundly influenced modern drama and performance art. He inspired generations of artists to challenge conventional forms and embrace the power of the subconscious. Here are 49 of his quotes:

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?... We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone. (Antonin Artaud)

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

Antonin Artaud

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

Antonin Artaud

I myself am an absolute abyss.

Antonin Artaud

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

Antonin Artaud

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

Antonin Artaud

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

Antonin Artaud

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

Antonin Artaud

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.

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 nastiness.

Antonin Artaud

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. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.

Antonin Artaud

Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.

Antonin Artaud

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

Antonin Artaud

Those who live, live off the dead.

Antonin Artaud

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. (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.

Antonin Artaud

All writing is filth.

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.

Antonin Artaud

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Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud - Image

Occupation: French Poet
Born: September 4, 1896
Died: March 4, 1948
Quotes count: 49
Wikipedia: Antonin Artaud

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