Quote

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Jean Cocteau

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
Designer
Film Director
Illustrator
Librettist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
Prosaist
Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Dictionary
Masterpiece
Greatest
Literature
Order

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

Image
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
Jean Cocteau
Image
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Jean Cocteau
Image
In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
Jean Cocteau
Image
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Jean Cocteau
Image
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
Image
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Jean Cocteau
Image
The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
Jean Cocteau
Image
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau
Image
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
Image
A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.
Jean Cocteau
Image
Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau