Iva > Iva's Quotes

“For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.”
― Antonin Artaud

“How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”
― Antonin Artaud

“This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
bourgeoisie.

In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs.”
― Antonin Artaud

“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”
― Antonin Artaud

“To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.”
― Paul Valery

“Power without abuse loses its charm.”
― Paul Valery

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. ”
― Paul Valery

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”
― Paul Valery

“Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.”
― Paul Valery

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”
― Marshall McLuhan

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes".”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

“Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone you love.”
― Woody Allen, Standup Comic

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”
― Woody Allen

“Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.”
― Woody Allen

“Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.”
― Woody Allen

“Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.”
― Woody Allen

“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.”
― Woody Allen