Daily Inspiration Quote by Antonin Artaud

A clean knife of a sentence: it cuts morality down to metabolism. Artaud’s “Those who live, live off the dead” refuses the sentimental story we like to tell about life as self-made and innocent. Living is extraction. We are literally nourished by decay, and socially sustained by the labor, traditions, and losses we didn’t personally earn. The blunt repetition of “live” works like an accusation and a diagnosis at once, collapsing biology and culture into the same pitiless cycle.

The subtext is Artaud’s real target: the genteel theater and bourgeois comfort that pretend art is refinement rather than ritual, sacrifice, and contagion. In the 1930s, as Europe slid toward mechanized slaughter, Artaud was developing his Theatre of Cruelty - not cruelty as sadism, but as the uncompromising truth that bodies are vulnerable and systems feed on that vulnerability. “Live off” carries economic bite: the living don’t just inherit the dead, they exploit them, converting corpses into continuity, turning catastrophe into civilization’s fuel.

It’s also a self-indictment. Artaud’s work is haunted by illness, confinement, and psychic extremity; he knew what it meant to be treated as disposable material for institutions that keep functioning. The line’s intent isn’t nihilism so much as a demand for honesty: if existence is predatory, stop dressing it up. Art, then, must be an exorcism - a public confrontation with what society consumes to keep calling itself alive.