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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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
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Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
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Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
Jean Cocteau
The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
Jean Cocteau
It is not inspiration it is expiration.
Jean Cocteau
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
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
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
The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
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
Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
Jean Cocteau
The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
Jean Cocteau
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
