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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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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
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Film Director
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Librettist
Novelist
Painter
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Playwright
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
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau
Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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
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
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
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
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
The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
Jean Cocteau
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
I have never felt any connection with my family. There isI must say simplysomething 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
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
