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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

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Antonin Artaud
Age: 51 †
Born: 1896
Born: September 4
Died: 1948
Died: March 4
Actor
Author
Comedy Writer
Director
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Critic
Film Director
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Marseille
France
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud
People
Prepared
Misunderstood
Whose
Insanity
Genius
Frightened
Head
Solution
Idea
Preparation
Strangulation
Ideas
Depression
Delirium
Every
Shining
Madman
Life
Solutions
Madmen

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

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It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.
Antonin Artaud
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
Antonin Artaud
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
Antonin Artaud
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The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
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These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.
Antonin Artaud
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Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
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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
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And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.
Antonin Artaud
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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
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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Antonin Artaud
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
Antonin Artaud
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I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
Antonin Artaud
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
Antonin Artaud
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
Antonin Artaud
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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
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
Antonin Artaud
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
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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
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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