Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.
JEAN COCTEAUFight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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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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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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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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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
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The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
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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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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
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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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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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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.
JEAN COCTEAU