Antonin ArtaudThinkers

The Actor is an athlete of the heart.

The Actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

Awe is lost when we lose ourselves in consideration of the imagined form and meaning of our acts instead of being impelled by their force.

Beauty never strikes us directly when it is true. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

Cruelty is inherent in man. Art is unique in that it embodies and intensifies these underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience.

Cruelty is suggestive of rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

Death is not a result of our having to die... rather, we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined eternally to reenact their escape.

Language is incomprehensible when true, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Life is a matter of burning up questions.

Life is that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Literature is that which we must wash off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

A Madman 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, rather than become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

The Madman is, in part, 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.