Antonin Artaud quotes

" And what is an authentic madman? It is 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. 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. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. " # Madness # Truth # Words

" 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. " # Order # Ideas # Leaders and Leadership

" 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. " # Poetry and Poets # Books - Reading # Love

" All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth. " # Language # Beggars # Friends and Friendship

" 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. " # Delinquency # Power # Love

" So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair. " # Despair # Love # Failure

" It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present. " # Drugs # Work # Absence

" Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones. " # Fatigue # Culture # Death and Dying

" 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. " # Insanity # Genius # Love

" 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. " # Life and Living # Love # Age and Aging