Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
JEAN COCTEAUIf it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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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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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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Art is science in the flesh.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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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.
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Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
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One must not mistake majority for truth.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
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It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
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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.
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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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The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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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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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
JEAN COCTEAU