Antonin Artaud Quotes

"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."
-Antonin Artaud

"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."
-Antonin Artaud

"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

"We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary."
-Antonin Artaud in Death quotes.

"Those who live, live off the dead."
-Antonin Artaud

"Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being."
-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

"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

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