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 COCTEAUListen 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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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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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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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.
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Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
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One must not mistake majority for truth.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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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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I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.
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Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.
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Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
JEAN COCTEAU