Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cocteau is puncturing the polite lie that art is made to be applauded. Admiration is the easy currency of salons and premieres: it flatters the audience as much as the artist, costs nothing, and evaporates the moment you leave the room. Belief is harder. It asks the viewer to surrender a little skepticism and enter a world on the artist's terms, even when those terms are strange, artificial, or openly theatrical.

Coming from Cocteau, that distinction carries extra bite. He lived across mediums - poetry, film, drawing - and his best work turns on the idea that obvious artifice can still tell the truth. Orphee, La Belle et la Bete: mirrors that become portals, beasts that are heartbreakingly human. These are not pleas for reverence; they're propositions. If you believe the mirror is a doorway, you can follow him into grief, desire, vanity, and the glamorous self-mythologizing of the modern artist. If you merely admire the craft, you stay safely outside.

The subtext is almost adversarial: don't clap for me, commit. Cocteau is also defending the poet against the social role of "genius" as decoration. Admiration pins the artist like a butterfly - pretty, inert, categorized. Belief keeps the work alive and risky, because it means the poem has persuaded you of an emotional or moral reality you didn't possess five minutes earlier. In that sense, he isn't asking to be liked; he's asking to be taken seriously in the only way art can be serious: by changing what feels possible.