Quote

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.

Antonin Artaud

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Men
Lying
Madman
Life
Found
Poisoned
Place
Madmen
Truth
Content
Matter
Calm
Mind
Concepts
Believe
Lies
Really
Asks
Impulsiveness

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

Image
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
Antonin Artaud
Image
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
Antonin Artaud
Image
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
Antonin Artaud
Image
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
Image
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
Antonin Artaud