Playwrights From France

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics."

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

"All true language is incomprehensible, Like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth."

"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 practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself."

"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."

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

"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."

"Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being."

"Suicidez-vous, désespérés, et vous, torturés du corps et de l'âme, perdez tout espoir. Il n'y a plus pour vous de soulagement en ce monde. Le monde vit de vos charniers."

"Un désespoir paisible, sans convulsions de colère et sans reproches au ciel est la sagesse même."

"Les acteurs sont bien heureux, ils ont une gloire sans responsabilité."

"On étouffe les clameurs, mais comment se venger du silence?"

"Tout homme a vu le mur qui borne son esprit."

"L'histoire est un roman dont le peuple est l'auteur."

"L'existence du Soldat est (après la peine de mort) la trace la plus douloureuse de barbarie qui subsiste parmi les hommes."

"La presse est une bouche forcée d'être toujours ouverte et de parler toujours. De là vient qu'elle dit mille fois qu'elle n'a rien à dire."

"Un livre est une bouteille jetée en pleine mer sur laquelle il faut coller cette étiquette: attrape qui peut."

"Le théâtre n'a jamais été en Angleterre qu'une mode des hautes classes ou une débauche du bas peuple."

"I was always fascinated with the 1820s, that romantic decade, and the revolution of 1830 which was of course a disaster everywhere, and 1848. I still read with great joy about that period, I don't know why. It's funny how you find a decade, or a period or a place that you just respond to. (“It is a long time ago, and it's a very confused period…”) Very confused, yes. Very good writers you had in France particularly, Vigny, people like that, oh! I love Vigny, and they meant a great deal to me, those people. I haven't read them for many, many years. But they also shaped my view of the world."

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."

"With the vast sweep of his imagination Jules Verne created a whole world of magical things imbued with a delightful naiveté, which just charm us..."

"Veliká fantazie Julesa Vernea vytvořila svět, kouzelný svět plný rozkošné naivity, která je tolik půvabná..."

"Je voudrais aussi, dans ces notes, rendre hommage à l’homme d’incommensurable génie que fut Jules Verne. Mon admiration pour lui est infinie. Dans certaines pages du Voyage au centre de la terre, de Cinq Semaines en ballon, de Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, de De la Terre à la Lune et de Autour de la Lune, de l’Île mystérieuse, d’Hector Servadac, il s’est élevé aux plus hautes cimes que puisse atteindre le verbe humain. [...] Ô maître incomparable, soyez béni pour les heures sublimes que j’ai passées toute ma vie à vous lire et à vous relire sans cesse."

"For twenty years, the people who move forward have been doing a Jules Verne."

"We found a text in a translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that mentioned Villeroi as the math teacher to Jules Verne. They were from the same city."

"I would also like, in these notes, to pay homage to that man of incommensurable genius, namely Jules Verne. My admiration for him is boundless. In certain pages of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, The Mysterious Island and Hector Servadac, he raised himself to the highest peaks that can be attained by human language. [...] O incomparable master, may you be blessed for the sublime hours which I have spent endlessly reading and rereading your works through my life."

"It was Jules Verne who launched me on this trip."

"Almost as influential as my natural penchant was a marvelous book, which impressed and fascinated me more than any other—Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. I have re-read it many times, and I confess I sometimes re-read it still, each time finding anew the joys and enthusiasm of my childhood."

"In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age."

"I would have bartered a diamond mine for a glass of pure spring water!"

"(What books did you read as a child?) I read Emilio Salgari, Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, and all the detective novels I could lay my hands on."

"Les poëtes sont comme les proverbes : l’un est toujours là pour contredire l’autre."

"All my texts were written, directly or allusively, to celebrate (Captain Hatteras's) discovery of the North Pole."

"Ainsi est-il du cœur de l’homme. Le besoin de faire œuvre qui dure, qui lui survive, est le signe de sa supériorité sur tout ce qui vit ici-bas. C’est ce qui a fondé sa domination, et c’est ce qui la justifie dans le monde entier."

"La civilisation ne recule jamais, et il semble qu’elle emprunte tous les droits à la nécessité."

"Les hommes, Pencroff, si savants qu’ils puissent être, ne pourront jamais changer quoi que ce soit à l’ordre cosmographique établi par Dieu même.'— Et pourtant, ajouta Pencroff, qui montra une certaine difficulté à se résigner, le monde est bien savant! Quel gros livre, monsieur Cyrus, on ferait avec tout ce qu’on sait!'— Et quel plus gros livre encore avec tout ce qu’on ne sait pas, répondit Cyrus Smith."

"L’homme n’est jamais ni parfait, ni content."

"Yes, but water decomposed into its primitive elements... and decomposed doubtless, by electricity, which will then have become a powerful and manageable force, for all great discoveries, by some inexplicable law, appear to agree and become complete at the same time. Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power. There is, therefore, nothing to fear. As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future!"

"Celui qui se trompe dans une intention qu’il croit bonne, on peut le combattre, on ne cesse pas de l’estimer."

"Malheur à qui est seul, mes amis, et il faut croire que l’isolement a vite fait de détruire la raison."

"Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life. When I was not more than ten or eleven years old I read his Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and my young imagination was fired. This generation may have forgotten that Verne was a great scientist as well as the writer of the most romantic fiction of his day."

"Qu'un Anglais comme lui fît le tour du monde un sac à la main, passe encore; mais une femme ne pouvait entreprendre une pareille traversée dans ces conditions."

"Phileas Fogg avait gagné son pari. Il avait accompli en quatre-vingts jours ce voyage autour du monde ! Il avait employé pour ce faire tous les moyens de transport, paquebots, railways, voitures, yachts, bâtiments de commerce, traîneaux, éléphant. L'excentrique gentleman avait déployé dans cette affaire ses merveilleuses qualités de sang-froid et d'exactitude. Mais après ? Qu'avait-il gagné à ce déplacement ? Qu'avait-il rapporté de ce voyage ?'Rien, dira-t-on ? Rien, soit, si ce n'est une charmante femme, qui — quelque invraisemblable que cela puisse paraître — le rendit le plus heureux des hommes !'En vérité, ne ferait-on pas, pour moins que cela, le Tour du Monde ?"

"Personne n'ignore que l'Inde — ce grand triangle renversé dont la base est au nord et la pointe au sud — comprend une superficie de quatorze cent mille milles carrés, sur laquelle est inégalement répandue une population de cent quatre-vingts millions d'habitants. Le gouvernement britannique exerce une domination réelle sur une certaine partie de cet immense pays. Il entretient un gouverneur général à Calcutta, des gouverneurs à Madras, à Bombay, au Bengale, et un lieutenant-gouverneur à Agra.'Mais l'Inde anglaise proprement dite ne compte qu'une superficie de sept cent mille milles carrés et une population de cent à cent dix millions d'habitants. C'est assez dire qu'une notable partie du territoire échappe encore à l'autorité de la reine; et, en effet, chez certains rajahs de l'intérieur, farouches et terribles, l'indépendance indoue est encore absolue."