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History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

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
Truth
Unreality
Fables
Combination
Lies
Becomes
Lying
History
Reality
Fable

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Jean Cocteau
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In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
Jean Cocteau
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How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
Jean Cocteau
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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
Jean Cocteau
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You have comfort. You don't have luxury. And don't tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have NO Fear or Discomfort.
Jean Cocteau
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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau
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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
Jean Cocteau
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
Jean Cocteau
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The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
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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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau