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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
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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
World
Adults
Feds
Nothings
Touch
Brutal
Momentous
Childhood
Heroic
Inquisition
Cost
Costs
Withstand
Whose
Adult
Airy
Quality
Ill
Fitted
True
Substance
Restored
Must
Mysterious
Prevail
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
Jean Cocteau
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
Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
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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 public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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The joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
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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 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 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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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
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The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
Jean Cocteau
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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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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