Famous Quotes by Antonin Artaud

  • And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially... More
  • There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened... More
  • However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order... More
  • It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it... More
  • All true language
    is incomprehensible,
    Like the chatter
    of a beggar’s teeth. More
  • Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of... More
  • The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself... More
  • So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the... More
  • There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of... More
  • You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know,... More
  • Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their... More
  • Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined... More
  • Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all... More
  • If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.... More
  • The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words,... More
  • When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know... More
  • With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs,... More
  • Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life. More
  • Where there is a stink of shit
    there is a smell of being. More
  • Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way... More
  • Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level... More
  • It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the... More
  • I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I... More
  • But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about... More
  • No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get... More
  • It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth... More
  • It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a... More

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