Antonin Artaud

Playwright, Actor, Theorist

Antonin Artaud was a French playwright and theorist known for his radical ideas on theater and the concept of the 'theater of cruelty.'

Born
September 4, 1896
Died
March 4, 1948
Quotes
90
Rank
#174

Quote collection

Antonin Artaud quotes (page 4 of 5)

90 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"Without sarcasm I sink into chaos."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"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."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker)."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"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."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"And 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."

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"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."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"[defines a madman as] 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."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows."

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"For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"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."

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Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist
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"[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis."

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"By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality."

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