Jean Cocteau Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

Jean Cocteau
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...

Jean Cocteau
Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

Jean Cocteau
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Jean Cocteau
Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.

Jean Cocteau
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

Jean Cocteau
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

Jean Cocteau
Disavow anyone who provokes or accepts the extermination of a race to which he does not belong.

Jean Cocteau
Tact consists in knowing how far to go in going too far.

Jean Cocteau
Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.

Jean Cocteau
Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.

Jean Cocteau
Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?

Jean Cocteau
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.

Jean Cocteau
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

Jean Cocteau
Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

Jean Cocteau
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Jean Cocteau
What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

Jean Cocteau
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.

Jean Cocteau
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Jean Cocteau
The extreme limit of wisdom — that's what the public calls madness.

Jean Cocteau
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Jean Cocteau
Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

Jean Cocteau
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

Jean Cocteau
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Jean Cocteau
Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.

Jean Cocteau
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.... The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Jean Cocteau
Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

Jean Cocteau
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Jean Cocteau
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Jean Cocteau