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

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
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My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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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.
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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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.
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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.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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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.
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