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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
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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 artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean Cocteau
Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
Jean Cocteau
Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
Jean Cocteau
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
