One must not mistake majority for truth.
JEAN COCTEAUSuch 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.
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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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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.
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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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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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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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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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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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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
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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.
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Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
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The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
JEAN COCTEAU