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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

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
Always
Design
Event
Life
Events
Actual
Preconceived
Philosophy
Simplicity
Bewildered
Belief
Bear
Tragedies
History
Tragedy
Grandeur
Art
Relation
Bizarre
Seems
Bears
Inherent
Ideas
Elements
Element

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Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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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.
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
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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.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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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!
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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.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
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