Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Jobs
Effect
Freshness
Light
Clean
Corny
Take
Poet
Spontaneity
Done
Effects
Originally
Youth
Commonplace
Produce
Polish
Rest
Originality
Literature
Produces
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
The cinema is death at work.
Jean Cocteau
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean Cocteau
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
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau
The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.
Jean Cocteau
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
Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
Jean Cocteau
My only politics have been friendship.
Jean Cocteau
one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started
Jean Cocteau
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Jean Cocteau
The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
Jean Cocteau