A Quote by 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

Quote Topics

Fragile Friend His How Leonardo Loved Old Old Friend Only Our Perched Photograph Photographs Right Say Sistine Worked Workers Would

Quote Author

Jean Cocteau
French - Novelist
July 5, 1889 - October 11, 1963

Don't listen to those who say, you taking too big a chance. Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.

Neil Simon

A photographer who does not know how to translate his feelings and ideas into a graphically satisfactory form is bound to produce ineffective photographs, no matter how idealistic, compassionate, sensitive or imaginative he may be. For in order to be considered good, a photograph must not only say something worthwhile, it must say it well.

Andreas Feininger

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

Francois Cavanna

Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they're doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real.

Gianni Versace

If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?

Stan Lee

It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Duane Michals

Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.

Walter Isaacson

If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.

Meister Eckhart

If God dislikes gays so much, how come he picked Michelangelo, a known homosexual, to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling while assigning Anita Bryant to go on television and push orange juice?

Mike Royko

In a world where the 2 billionth photograph has been uploaded to Flickr, which looks like an Eggleston picture! How do you deal with making photographs with the tens of thousands of photographs being uploaded to Facebook every second, how do you manage that? How do you contribute to that? What's the point?

Alec Soth

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

Dorothea Lange

As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.

Stephen Chbosky

Leonardo da Vinci had such a playful curiosity. If you read his notebooks, you'll see he's curious about what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like, but also why the sky is blue, or how an emotion forms on somebody's lips. He understood the beauty of everything. I've admired Leonardo my whole life, both as a kid who loved engineering - he was one of the coolest engineers in history - and then as a college student, when I travelled to see his notebooks and paintings.

Walter Isaacson

Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.