Quotes from Alfred Jarry

Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.

God is the shortest distance from zero to infinity.

Dieu est le point tangent de ze ro et de l'infini. God is the tangential point of zero and the infinite.

It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom

By the grace of pataphysics, two telepathic letters from the Doctor to Lord Kelvin, and some geometrical equations, we are instructed that the exception is more reliable than the rule, imagination more accurate than fact, poetry more authentic than life, that Man is God, and God is the Tangential Point Between Zero and Infinity.

Hey! Not so fast, or we might arrive on time. Freedom means never arriving on time—never, never!

It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.

Blind and unwavering undisciplined at all times constitutes the real strength of all free men.

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

You're looking exceptionally ugly tonight, Madam, is it because we have company?

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.

Just as the poppy and the dandelion are scythed down in the flower of their youth by the pitiless scythe of the pitiless scyther who pitilessly scythes their pitiful pans, so poor Renski has played the pretty poppy's pitiful part.

Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.

It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom

That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.

The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.

One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.

there are only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days...and that life is continuous; yet that one would never be aware of its continuity, nor even that life exists without these pendulum movements; and life is primarily verified by the beating of the heart

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be - and perhaps should be - envisaged in the place of the traditional one.