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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
Saying
Simple
Many
Way
Things
People
According
Complicated
Style

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
Jean Cocteau
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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
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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
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
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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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Jean Cocteau
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The cinema is death at work.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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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How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
Jean Cocteau
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The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
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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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau