Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
JEAN COCTEAUEverything 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.
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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.
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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
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You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
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There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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