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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.

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
Self
Close
Truest
Men
Risk
Instincts
Eyes
Require
Taken
Illegal
Dark
Realization
Eye
Instinct
Learn
Angel
Realizations
Might
Follow
Unawares

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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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.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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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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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
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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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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
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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 worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
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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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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
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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.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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