Quotes by Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

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

Calm

Kind

Real

Actors are athletes of the heart.

Actors

Athlete

Heart

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

Drug

Poetry

War

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

People

Pigs

Writing

And war is wonderful, isn’t it? For it’s war, isn’t it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

Competition

Order

War

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.

Ideas

Mad

Men

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.

Danger

Distance

Theatre

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.

Rotting

Soul

World

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

Men

Unhappy

World

How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

Dream

Eye

Sleep

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Absolutes

Abyss

Actors

Affirmation

Angel

Art

Asylums

Athlete

Beautiful

Believe

Bombs

Book

Break Through

Calm

Competition

Creation

Crude

Danger

Delirium Tremens

Depression

Dice

Distance

Dream

Drug

Duration

Enough

Essentials

Europe

Existence

Eye

Giving

Hands

Heart

Humanity

Ideas

Impact

Insane

Insane Asylum

Instinct

Kind

Language

Law

Light

Long

Lying

Mad

Madness

Magic

May

Mean

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Quotes by Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

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

Actors are athletes of the heart.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

And war is wonderful, isn’t it? For it’s war, isn’t it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

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.

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.

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

How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

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