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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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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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The joy of the young is to disobey
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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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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Art is science made flesh.
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
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Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
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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.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
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I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
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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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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
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The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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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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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
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