Quote

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 Cocteau

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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
Designer
Film Director
Illustrator
Librettist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
Prosaist
Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Life
Death
Smoke
Stills
Express
Doe
Oneself
Still
Train
Everything
Concern
Even
Drug
Opium
Something
Toward
Occurs
Love
Moving
Racing

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.
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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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The cinema is death at work.
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Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Jean Cocteau
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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau
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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Jean Cocteau
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Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
Jean Cocteau
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The joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
Jean Cocteau
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
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one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started
Jean Cocteau
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
Jean Cocteau
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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
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History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
Jean Cocteau