Jean Cocteau Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Jean Cocteau
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.

Jean Cocteau
People would say to Al Brown: "You are not a boxer. You are a dancer." He laughed at this, and won.

Jean Cocteau
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

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
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

Jean Cocteau
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical.

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

Jean Cocteau
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

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

Jean Cocteau
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

Jean Cocteau
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal... unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.

Jean Cocteau