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Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.

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
Someone
Window
Occupants
Without
Plans
Journeys
Make
Journey
Opium
Room
Marriages
Rooms
Passes
Friends
Falling
Hope
Appear
Fall
Foolish

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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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.
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A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.
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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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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.
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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 world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
Jean Cocteau
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
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.
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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.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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