Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Antonin Artaud (French Drama Theorist)

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948,) fully Antoine-Marie-Joseph Artaud, was a French dramatist, actor, director, and theoretician of the Surrealist movement. He was the creator of the concept of the nonverbal Theater of Cruelty; his impact on post-war experimental theatre was profound.

Born in Marseilles, Artaud became an active member of the Surrealist movement 1924–26. He published a volume of verse, L’ombilic des limbes (1925, ‘The Umbilicus of Limbo,’) and co-founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry (1927) which produced surreal, symbolist plays. He also wrote the script for the surrealist film La Coquille et le clergyman (1926, “The Seashell and the Clergyman”) and appeared in several other films, most famously as Jean-Paul Marat in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) and Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928.)

Artaud was one of the 20th century’s most important theoreticians of the drama. Influenced by oriental acting and Balinese dancing, Artaud aimed to reinstate drama to its symbolic and ceremonial roots. He created the non-verbal Theatre of Cruelty (Théâtre de la Cruauté,) which focused on the use of sound, mime, rhythm, and lighting to astonish audiences.

Artaud produced the play Les Cenci (1935) based on his theoretical works. Even though it was not successful, his collected essays, published as Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté (1932, “Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty”) and Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double, 1958) had a powerful influence on such dramatists and directors as Jean-Louis Barrault, Roger Blin, and Peter Brook.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Antonin Artaud

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
Topics: Suffering

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Creativity

Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Theater

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 moldy 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
Topics: Education, Colleges, Universities

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Tyranny

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
Topics: Drugs

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Suicide

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
Topics: Despair

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Psychiatry

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Language

The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words…creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words…Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery…The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Theater

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.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Madness

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

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
Topics: Morals

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
Topics: Life and Living

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Work

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
Topics: Genius, Insanity

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
Topics: Theater, Language

The actor is an athlete of the heart.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Actors

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Psychiatry

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

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 oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Mental Illness

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Poetry, Poets

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
Topics: Science, Scientists, Mathematics

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 practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
Antonin Artaud
Topics: Order

There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.
Antonin Artaud

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