Antonin Artaud quotes

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Antonin Artaud

Birthdate: 4. September 1896
Date of death: 4. March 1948

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud , was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.

Photo: Agence de presse Meurisse, This file comes from Gallica Digital Library and is available under the digital ID btv1b8539368j / Public domain

Quotes Antonin Artaud

„It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.“

— Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Nature, Painting

„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.“

— Antonin Artaud

Appeal to Youth: Intoxication-Disintoxication (1934).

Feeling, Time

„All true language
is incomprehensible,
Like the chatter
of a beggar’s teeth.“

— Antonin Artaud

Ci-Gît.

„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. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.“

— Antonin Artaud

Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities. Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 2 (1956, trans. 1968).

World, Law, Way, Universe

„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

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Life, People, Idea

„I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.“

— Antonin Artaud

People

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

— Antonin Artaud

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Life, Art

„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.“

— Antonin Artaud

Source: Lettres à Génica Athanasiou

Pain, Angels, Hell, Understanding

„I myself am an absolute abyss.“

— Antonin Artaud

„We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.“

— Antonin Artaud

Lie, Heart

„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

Source: Selected Writings

Men, Books, Reality, Madness

„You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?… We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.“

— Antonin Artaud

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Life, Men, Pain, Peace

„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.“

— Antonin Artaud

Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)

Life

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

— Antonin Artaud

Quoted in the memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, The Grenier des Grands-Augustins, pt. 2, Memories for Tomorrow (1972, trans. 1974).

Life

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

— Antonin Artaud

Ci-Gît (1947).

„Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.“

— Antonin Artaud

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

People, Drawing

„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

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Life, Imagination

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

— Antonin Artaud

Law, Dreams, Search

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

— Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Hell, Painting

„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.“

— Antonin Artaud

People, Parting

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