Quotessence
Home / Authors / Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud Quotes

Playwright

Filter quotes by topic

AllMenTheatreMindLanguageTheaterMisunderstood GeniusSuicideCertainCrueltyHas BeensHumansIdeasOrderPeopleWayArtaudAsylumsHeartIfsMadness

Famous Antonin Artaud Quotes

“The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”

KindHas BeensOrderPayMoralElementsUnderstoodPaidPassionateExtremesTheatreViolentCrueltyPurityConceptionNot AfraidBloodySevereRigourScenicCondensationMoral Purity
Book:The Theater and Its Double
Create image

“[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.”

WritingArtAuthorityDefinitionsFamiliarCrueltyThrillBrutalityPersuasiveDeclaringCitingMotifsArtaud
Author:Antonin Artaud
Create image

“Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.”

FirstsHumansMeanHas BeensStillsBodyFallDifficultLevelsTeachSkyTerribleExercisePerformancesEarsTheaterTheatreCrueltyNosesMailEmperorDetachedAnatomyHackingParcelCarvingAssyrians
Book:The Theater and Its Double
Create image