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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

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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
Things
People
According
Complicated
Style
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Simple
Many
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
Jean Cocteau
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Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
Jean Cocteau
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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
Jean Cocteau
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The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.
Jean Cocteau
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau
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The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
Jean Cocteau
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
Jean Cocteau
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It is not inspiration it is expiration.
Jean Cocteau
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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
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Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
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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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
Jean Cocteau