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

More quotes by 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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My only politics have been friendship.
Jean Cocteau
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
Jean Cocteau
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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
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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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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Jean Cocteau
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
Jean Cocteau
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And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.
Jean Cocteau
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
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Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
Jean Cocteau
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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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The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
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