Antonin Artaud
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.Collection: Men
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.Collection: Would Be
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.Collection: Flames
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.Collection: Death
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.Collection: War
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.Collection: Lying
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.Collection: Moments
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.Collection: People
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Beautiful
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.Collection: Pain
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.Collection: Analogies
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Moving
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.Collection: Lying
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.Collection: Unique
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.Collection: Suicide
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Eye
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.Collection: Theatre
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.Collection: Determination
The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.Collection: Light
How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Roots
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.Collection: Mind
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.Collection: Suicide
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.Collection: Heart
Actors are athletes of the heart.Collection: Heart
The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Nastiness
When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Storm
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.Collection: Actors
And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.Collection: Flames
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.Collection: Math
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.Collection: War
Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Order