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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

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

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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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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.
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
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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.
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Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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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!
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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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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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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