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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

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
Art
Dilettantism
Erection
Appreciation
Critics
Otherwise
Mere
Moral

More quotes by 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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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
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Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
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One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
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What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
Jean Cocteau
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
Jean Cocteau
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Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean Cocteau
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Jean Cocteau
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau