Top 80 Antonin Artaud Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The actor is an athlete of the heart.”

— Antonin Artaud

2. “No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

— Antonin Artaud

3. “Life consists of burning up questions.”

— Antonin Artaud

4. “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

5. “This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.”

— Antonin Artaud

6. “I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.”

— Antonin Artaud

7. “Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.”

— Antonin Artaud

8. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

9. “I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”

— Antonin Artaud

10. “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

11. “Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.”

— Antonin Artaud

12. “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

13. “All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.”

— Antonin Artaud

14. “I myself am an absolute abyss.”

— Antonin Artaud

15. “To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.”

— Antonin Artaud

16. “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

17. “Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.”

— Antonin Artaud

18. “We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”

— Antonin Artaud

19. “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

20. “The fixation of the theater in one language – written words, music, lights, noises – betokens its imminent ruin.”

— Antonin Artaud

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

— Antonin Artaud

22. “I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”

— Antonin Artaud

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

— Antonin Artaud

24. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

25. “Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.”

— Antonin Artaud

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26. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

29. “The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.”

— Antonin Artaud

30. “The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.”

— Antonin Artaud

31. “All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.”

— Antonin Artaud

32. “There is nothing more useless than a organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.”

— Antonin Artaud

33. “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

34. “There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.”

— Antonin Artaud

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

— Antonin Artaud

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.”

— Antonin Artaud

39. “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

40. “Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.”

— Antonin Artaud

41. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

Featured in: Reading Quotes

44. “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

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

— Antonin Artaud

46. “Those who live, live off the dead.”

— Antonin Artaud

47. “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.”

— Antonin Artaud

48. “I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”

— Antonin Artaud

49. “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

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

— Antonin Artaud