Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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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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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
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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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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.
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Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
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There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
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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.
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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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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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When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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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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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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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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Living is a horizontal fall.
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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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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
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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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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
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You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have NO Fear or Discomfort.
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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
JEAN COCTEAU