Jean Cocteau Quotes

113 Sourced Quotes

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

Jean Cocteau
The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.

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

Jean Cocteau
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Jean Cocteau
One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.

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

Jean Cocteau
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

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

Jean Cocteau
Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.

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
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
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

Jean Cocteau
I listen to a jazz band at the Casino de Paris: high in the air, in a kind of cage, the Negroes writhe, dandle, toss lumps of raw meat to the crowd in the form of trumpet screams, rattles, drumbeats. The dance tune, broken, punched, counterpointed rises now and again to the surface.

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

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
Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical.

Jean Cocteau
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

Jean Cocteau
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

Jean Cocteau
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

Jean Cocteau
In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

Jean Cocteau