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In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

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
Men
Monster
Monsters
Mysterious
Allow
Mistake
Since
Cogs
Society
Considers
Live
Masterpiece

More quotes by 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.
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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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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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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
Jean Cocteau
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
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Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
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 worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Jean Cocteau
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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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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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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
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My only politics have been friendship.
Jean Cocteau
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History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Jean Cocteau
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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