The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
JEAN COCTEAU
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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
JEAN COCTEAU -
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 -
Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Art is science in the flesh.
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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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You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
JEAN COCTEAU -
It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
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Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
JEAN COCTEAU