Antonin Artaud Quotes

Quotes about:

• A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

  Antonin Artaud

  Real, Calm, Kind

  100 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Order, Break Through

  "The Theatre and Its Double". Book by Antonin Artaud, 1938.

  59 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Dream, Law, Fever

  51 Copy quote

• The actor is an athlete of the heart.

  Antonin Artaud

  Heart, Athlete, Actors

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.260, Univ of California Press

  75 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Pain, Work, Writing

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.497, Univ of California Press

  93 Copy quote

• Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

  Antonin Artaud

  Fall, Mean, Exercise

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.79, Grove Press

  62 Copy quote

• To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Break Through, Theatre

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.13, Grove Press

  55 Copy quote

• Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.

  Antonin Artaud

  Distance, Theatre, Danger

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Antonin Artaud

  Soul, World, Rotting

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.101, Univ of California Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Depression, Ideas, Delirium Tremens

  "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society". Essay by Antonin Artaud, 1947.

  70 Copy quote

• Life consists of burning up questions.

  Antonin Artaud

  Life, Burning

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.59, Univ of California Press

  20 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Communication, Teeth, Language

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.549, Univ of California Press

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, Reality

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.59, Univ of California Press

  12 Copy quote

• And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. 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 nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

  Antonin Artaud

  Men, Ideas, Mad

  Antonin Artaud (1988). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.485, Univ of California Press

  55 Copy quote

• Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

  Antonin Artaud

  Theatre, Diligence, Cruelty

  9 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Existence, Works Of Art

  56 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Insane, Asylums, Insane Asylum

  Antonin Artaud (1995). “Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period”

  11 Copy quote

• I myself am an absolute abyss.

  Antonin Artaud

  Abyss, Absolutes

  12 Copy quote

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Tragedy, Enough, Stage

  "Memories For Tomorrow". Book by Jean-Louis Barrault, 1974.

  37 Copy quote

• Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

  Antonin Artaud

  Sarcasm, Chaos

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Antonin Artaud

  Magic, Trying, Essentials

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.111, Grove Press

  5 Copy quote

• This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

  Antonin Artaud

  Beautiful, True Beauty, Sun

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.71, Grove Press

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Magic, Consideration, Form

  27 Copy quote

• It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

  Antonin Artaud

  Impact, Space, Giving

  12 Copy quote

• The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Theatre, Passionate

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

  15 Copy quote

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