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[defines a madman as] 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.
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
Human
Honor
Preferred
Humans
Word
Defines
Men
Rather
Socially
Idea
Superior
Nastiness
Sense
Superiors
Forfeit
Become
Mad
Madman
Certain
Madness
Asylums
Ideas
Accepted
Madmen
More quotes by Antonin Artaud
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
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
Antonin Artaud
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
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
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
Antonin Artaud
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.
Antonin Artaud
[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.
Antonin Artaud
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
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
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
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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
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
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
Antonin Artaud
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
Antonin Artaud
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
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
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
