Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
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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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
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One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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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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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
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Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
JEAN COCTEAU