Jean Cocteau Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.

Jean Cocteau
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system. … The craving for opium can be endured in a car.

Jean Cocteau
He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.

Jean Cocteau
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Jean Cocteau
Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.

Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.

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
Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go too far.

Jean Cocteau
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

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
The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed.
On his election to Académie Française (1955)

Jean Cocteau
Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.

Jean Cocteau
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Jean Cocteau
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

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

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

Jean Cocteau
Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

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

Jean Cocteau
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

Jean Cocteau
Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.

Jean Cocteau
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.

Jean Cocteau
Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.

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
I do not like to sleep when your body lies against mine at night, for I think of death which comes so quickly to put us thoroughly to sleep.

Jean Cocteau