"See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Jean Cocteau quotes (page 4 of 11)
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Poetry is a religion with no hope."
Read quote
10 likes
"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."
Read quote
9 likes
"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."
Read quote
9 likes
"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."
Read quote
9 likes
"It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously."
Read quote
9 likes
"The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation."
Read quote
9 likes
"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."
Read quote
9 likes
"I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed."
Read quote
9 likes
"I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say."
Read quote
8 likes
"Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism."
Read quote
8 likes
"When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing."
Read quote
8 likes
"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."
Read quote
8 likes
"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."
Read quote
8 likes
"It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."
Read quote
8 likes
"Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images."
Read quote
8 likes
"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."
Read quote
8 likes
"A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system."
Read quote
8 likes