All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. Antonin Artaud More Quotes by Antonin Artaud More Quotes From Antonin Artaud 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 understanding life facts We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter. Antonin Artaud matter heart lying We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms. Antonin Artaud doe men believe The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. Antonin Artaud passionate theatre order I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him. Antonin Artaud suicide morning science The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct. Antonin Artaud crude instinct actors In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. Antonin Artaud states skins mind 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 writing pigs people 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 writing book reality Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols. Antonin Artaud theatre battle eye 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 drug absence order We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human. Antonin Artaud literature want men There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death. Antonin Artaud insane-asylum insane asylums 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. Antonin Artaud nerves heart believe There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel. Antonin Artaud brothels theatre The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate. Antonin Artaud leisure ideas art 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. Antonin Artaud scientist understanding math Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. Antonin Artaud analogies destruction association Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones. Antonin Artaud bones culture needs Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations. Antonin Artaud magic shadow art
