Quote

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

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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
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The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
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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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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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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.
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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It is not inspiration it is expiration.
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The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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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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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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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.
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