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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
Lies
Becomes
Lying
History
Reality
Fable
Truth
Unreality
Fables
Combination

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.
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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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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Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Jean Cocteau
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I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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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The joy of the young is to disobey
Jean Cocteau
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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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Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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.
Jean Cocteau
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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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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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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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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
Jean Cocteau
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Jean Cocteau
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau