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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.

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
Yesterday
Beats
Criticism
Takes
Public
Today
Stick
Sticks
Beat

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
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Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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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.
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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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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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
Jean Cocteau
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jean Cocteau
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
Jean Cocteau
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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!
Jean Cocteau