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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
Jean Cocteau
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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
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Poet
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Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Jean Cocteau
The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
Jean Cocteau
Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
Jean Cocteau
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Jean Cocteau
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau
Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
Jean Cocteau
Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
Jean Cocteau
The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
Jean Cocteau
Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
