Quotes of Antonin Artaud - somelinesforyou

“ 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

“ Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra. ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ All writing is filth ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. ”

- 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

“ The fixation of the theater in one language — written words, music, lights, noises — betokens its imminent ruin. ”

- 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

“ The fixation of the theater in one language — written words, music, lights, noises — betokens its imminent ruin. ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius. ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel. ”

- 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

“ 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

“ 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

“ All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. ”

- Antonin Artaud

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

- Antonin Artaud

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

- 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… ”

- 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

“ The actor is an athlete of the heart. ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. ”

- 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

“ 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… ”

- Antonin Artaud

“ The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language… ”

- Antonin Artaud

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

- Antonin Artaud

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

- Antonin Artaud

“ Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones. ”

- 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

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

- 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
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