Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
JEAN COCTEAULiving is a horizontal fall.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
-
-
Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU -
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
JEAN COCTEAU -
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.
JEAN COCTEAU -
After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
JEAN COCTEAU -
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
JEAN COCTEAU