32 Quotes by Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, and actor who is known for his contributions to the Theatre of Cruelty, a style of theater that aimed to shock and disturb audiences. Artaud's plays, such as "The Cenci" and "The Spurt of Blood", are noted for their use of surrealism, symbolism, and violence. Artaud also wrote extensively on the subject of theater and his essays and manifestos helped to shape the modern understanding of the art form. Artaud struggled with mental illness for much of his life and spent several years in psychiatric hospitals. He died in 1948 at the age of 51. (Bio)
Antonin Artaud Quotes
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. (Meaning)
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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.
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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.
Those who live, live off the dead.
Life consists of burning up questions.
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.
The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
I myself am an absolute abyss.
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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.
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. (Meaning)
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.
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.
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
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.
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
― Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
