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

Antonin Artaud Quotes

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.

— Antonin Artaud

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.

— 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

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

— Antonin Artaud

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

— 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

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

— 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

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

— Antonin Artaud

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

— Antonin Artaud

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

I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

— Antonin Artaud

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

— Antonin Artaud

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

— Antonin Artaud

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

— Antonin Artaud

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

— Antonin Artaud

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

— 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.

— Antonin Artaud

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

— Antonin Artaud

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.

— Antonin Artaud
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