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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.

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
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Playwright
Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
Prosaist
Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Life
Visibility
Insists
Elegance
Poetry
Achieve
Hope
Living
Cannot

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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.
Jean Cocteau
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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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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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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
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
Jean Cocteau
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
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Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
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.
Jean Cocteau
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
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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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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
Jean Cocteau
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau