Antonin Artaud: Quotes about people

Antonin Artaud was French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Antonin Artaud: 88 quotes23 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.”

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

“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.”

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

“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.”

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“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 practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.”

Letter to André Gide (February 10, 1935).

“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 tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.”

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)