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
Moving
Racing
Love
Death
Smoke
Life
Stills
Express
Doe
Oneself
Still
Train
Concern
Everything
Drug
Opium
Even
Toward
Occurs
Something

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
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I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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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.
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
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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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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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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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Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
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Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
Jean Cocteau
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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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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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
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And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.
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