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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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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
Ethics
Capabilities
According
Imperative
Discipline
Constructed
Behavior
Ethic
Poetry
Imperatives
Secret
Capability
Categorical
Mean
Rejects
Falsification
Men
Code
Conducted

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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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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.
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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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The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
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The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent: as laughter.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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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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Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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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.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.
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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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