You're looking exceptionally ugly tonight, Madam, is it because we have company?
~ Alfred Jarry - [Socializing and Socialism]

It is conventional to call ''monster'' any blending of dissonant elements. I call ''monster'' every original inexhaustible beauty.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Taste]

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.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Theater]

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.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Theater]

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.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Tradition]

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.
~ Alfred Jarry - [God]

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.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Destructiveness]

Blind and unwavering undisciplined at all times constitutes the real strength of all free men.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Discipline]

We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Applause]

It is because the public are a mass -- inert, obtuse, and passive -- that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are -- and also where they stand. They are pretty harmless, in spite of their numbers, because they are fighting against intelligence.
~ Alfred Jarry - [Audiences]