All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
JEAN COCTEAUBeauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
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Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
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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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You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
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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.
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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
JEAN COCTEAU