Jean Cocteau Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

Jean Cocteau
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Jean Cocteau
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

Jean Cocteau
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

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 produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Jean Cocteau
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Jean Cocteau
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

Jean Cocteau
Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.

Jean Cocteau
Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical.

Jean Cocteau
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.

Jean Cocteau
Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.

Jean Cocteau
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

Jean Cocteau
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

Jean Cocteau
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.

Jean Cocteau
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.

Jean Cocteau
Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

Jean Cocteau
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

Jean Cocteau
Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

Jean Cocteau
In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

Jean Cocteau
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Jean Cocteau
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.

Jean Cocteau
The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

Jean Cocteau
Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

Jean Cocteau
The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

Jean Cocteau
We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

Jean Cocteau
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.

Jean Cocteau
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Jean Cocteau
Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.

Jean Cocteau