Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
JEAN COCTEAUMirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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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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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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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
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A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
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A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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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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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
JEAN COCTEAU