Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
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
Running
Ground
Without
Service
Nothing
Dog
Long
Poet
Exhausts
Poetry
Shaky
Knowing
Masterpiece
Religion
Trained
Hope
Performance
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
Jean Cocteau
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Jean Cocteau
Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
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
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.
Jean Cocteau
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Jean Cocteau
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
Jean Cocteau
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
Jean Cocteau
The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Jean Cocteau
Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
Jean Cocteau
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