"A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . ."
Read quote
99 likes
Quote collection
Antonin Artaud quotes (page 1 of 5)
90 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell."
Read quote
91 likes
"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. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity."
Read quote
86 likes
"But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes."
Read quote
83 likes
"The actor is an athlete of the heart."
Read quote
74 likes
"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."
Read quote
67 likes
"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."
Read quote
61 likes
"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."
Read quote
58 likes
"I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself"
Read quote
55 likes
"To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater."
Read quote
54 likes
"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."
Read quote
52 likes
"I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws."
Read quote
50 likes
"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."
Read quote
44 likes
"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."
Read quote
41 likes
"This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose."
Read quote
40 likes
"Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life."
Read quote
36 likes
"I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living."
Read quote
33 likes
"Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself."
Read quote
28 likes
"In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it."
Read quote
27 likes
"The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way."
Read quote
26 likes