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 ArtaudRead
Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Don't exhaust yourself unnecessarily, even for the sake of creating something significant.
This quote by Antonin Artaud emphasizes the importance of self-care and balance, cautioning against the idea of sacrificing one's well-being for the sake of cultural or artistic endeavors. While striving for greatness can be noble, it should not come at the cost of one's physical and mental health, suggesting that true creativity and culture should originate from a place of well-being rather than suffering and fatigue.
Themes
Self-CareBalanceWell-BeingCreativityCulture
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about the importance of mental health and creativity.
More from Antonin Artaud
All quotes βCruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin ArtaudRead
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
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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 ArtaudRead
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
Antonin ArtaudRead
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin ArtaudRead
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