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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
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Film Director
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Painter
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Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
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Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Art
Indispensable
Poetry
Knew
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
Jean Cocteau
The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Jean Cocteau
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
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
It is not inspiration it is expiration.
Jean Cocteau
French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
Jean Cocteau
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
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Jean Cocteau
The poet never asks for admiration he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
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
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Jean Cocteau
There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
Jean Cocteau
The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
Jean Cocteau
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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
