Quotes by Artaud, Antonin




Antonin Artaud (September 4, 1896March 4, 1948) was a playwright, actor, and director..


"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."

Artaud, Antonin on despair    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on drugs
3 fans of this quote    Share

"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape."

Artaud, Antonin on escapism    Share

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

Artaud, Antonin on fatigue    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on insanity
4 fans of this quote    Share

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

Artaud, Antonin on language    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on life
4 fans of this quote    Share

"However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself."

Artaud, Antonin on order    Share

"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us."

Artaud, Antonin on poetry and poets    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on psychiatry
3 fans of this quote    Share

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

Artaud, Antonin on riots    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on science    Share

"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."

Artaud, Antonin on theater    Share

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

Artaud, Antonin on tragedies    Share

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

Artaud, Antonin on creativity
3 fans of this quote    Share

Take a look at recent activity on QB!

 

Search Quotations Book