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Jean Cocteau Inspirational Quotes (126)

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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
Jean Cocteau
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
Jean Cocteau
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The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
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.
Jean Cocteau
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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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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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau
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The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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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The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.
Jean Cocteau
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The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet never asks for admiration he wants to be believed.
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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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
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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In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
Jean Cocteau
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