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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
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
Indispensable
Poetry
Knew
Art

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
Jean Cocteau
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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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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
Jean Cocteau
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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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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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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
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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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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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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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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
Jean Cocteau