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

More quotes by 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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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
Jean Cocteau
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Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
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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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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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.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
Jean Cocteau
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
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My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
Jean Cocteau
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
Jean Cocteau
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
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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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one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started
Jean Cocteau
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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau