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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

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
Italian
French
Mood
Europe
Country
People

More quotes by 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.
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He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
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The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
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The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent: as laughter.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
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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Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
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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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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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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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
Jean Cocteau
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau