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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
Beat
Yesterday
Beats
Criticism
Takes
Public
Today
Stick
Sticks
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Jean Cocteau
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Jean Cocteau
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
Jean Cocteau
Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Jean Cocteau
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
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
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.
Jean Cocteau
Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Jean Cocteau
The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau