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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

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
Pastime
Priesthood
Art

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
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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Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
Jean Cocteau
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
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My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
Jean Cocteau