Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU
Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
JEAN COCTEAU -
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
JEAN COCTEAU -
There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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 -
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 -
One must not mistake majority for truth.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
JEAN COCTEAU