Quote

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
Whose
Adult
Airy
Quality
Ill
Fitted
True
Substance
Restored
Must
Mysterious
Prevail
World
Adults
Feds
Nothings
Touch
Brutal
Momentous
Childhood
Heroic
Inquisition
Cost
Costs
Withstand

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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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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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I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
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Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
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Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
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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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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
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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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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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