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

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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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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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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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.
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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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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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