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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Jean Cocteau

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.
JEAN COCTEAU

Care Criticism Listening Work Yourself
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
JEAN COCTEAU

Achievement Elegant Hope Life Live Poetry
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
JEAN COCTEAU

Forever God Infinity Mystery Ourselves
Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
JEAN COCTEAU

Criticism Cultivate Hate Unique Work Yourself
A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
JEAN COCTEAU

Artist Paint Photograph Poet Rare True
The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
JEAN COCTEAU

Call Limitation Public Wisdom
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
JEAN COCTEAU

Character Dreams Friendship Habit Live Regret Stranger Surprise
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
JEAN COCTEAU

Feeling Goodness Motivational Music Mystery Object
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
JEAN COCTEAU

Acceptance Rejection Youth
French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
JEAN COCTEAU

Attitude Bad Identity Mood People Personality
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
JEAN COCTEAU

Help Important Recognition
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
JEAN COCTEAU

Myself Poetry Talk
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
JEAN COCTEAU

Art Beautiful Fashion Hands Production Time Ugly
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
JEAN COCTEAU

Audacity Far Journey Yourself
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
JEAN COCTEAU

Death Journal Receive Writing
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
JEAN COCTEAU

Fight Humor Intuition Mad Worst

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

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Popular Authors

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