Top 100 Jean Cocteau Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.
Jean Cocteau
#4. Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.
Jean Cocteau
#5. Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.
Jean Cocteau
#6. French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
Jean Cocteau
#7. One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Jean Cocteau
#9. One should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started
Jean Cocteau
#10. The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
Jean Cocteau
#14. Be yourself. The world worships the original.
Jean Cocteau
#15. 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
#17. Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
Jean Cocteau
#18. Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
#19. Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Jean Cocteau
#20. Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.
Jean Cocteau
#21. Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.
Jean Cocteau
#22. People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.
Jean Cocteau
#24. An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
#25. Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
Jean Cocteau
#26. Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
#27. The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
#28. I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Jean Cocteau
#29. Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
Jean Cocteau
#30. I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
#31. One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.
Jean Cocteau
#32. Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Jean Cocteau
#33. 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
#34. Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
#35. Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
#36. 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
#37. Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
Jean Cocteau
#38. A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
#39. Jacques' life was like the rooms of Montmartre women that are never cleaned because they get up at four o'clock and slip a coat over their nightgown to go downstairs and eat.
Jean Cocteau
#40. You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Jean Cocteau
#41. 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
#42. The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau
#43. All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Jean Cocteau
#44. To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream ...
... if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.
Jean Cocteau
#45. Classifiable things reek of death. You must strike out in other spheres ... quit the ranks. That's the sign of masterpieces and heroes. An original, that's the person to astonish and to rule.
Jean Cocteau
#46. Writing is an act of love. If it is not it is only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us.
The richness of the world is in its wastefulness.
Jean Cocteau
#47. 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
#48. Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
Jean Cocteau
#49. One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.
Jean Cocteau
#50. Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
#51. Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.
Jean Cocteau
#52. I expect a black silence that is almost as violent as laughter.
Jean Cocteau
#53. The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau
#55. I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.
Jean Cocteau
#56. I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
#57. 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, the finish by loading honors on your head.
Jean Cocteau
#58. An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
#59. Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.
Jean Cocteau
#60. I am burning myself up and will always do so.
Jean Cocteau
#61. A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
Jean Cocteau
#62. The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
#63. Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture ... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless ...
Jean Cocteau
#64. Plant
it
It will sprout
But forget about the rustic festivities
For the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal through
the compact generations
Jean Cocteau
#65. Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
Jean Cocteau
#66. I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.
Jean Cocteau
#67. True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Jean Cocteau
#69. The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Jean Cocteau
#70. To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
#71. The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
#72. 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
#73. At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
Jean Cocteau
#74. How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
Jean Cocteau
#75. Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.
Jean Cocteau
#76. When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming.
Jean Cocteau
#77. The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
Jean Cocteau
#78. 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
#79. The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
#80. If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
Jean Cocteau
#81. Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.
Jean Cocteau
#82. The obstinate miner
of the void
exploits
his fertile mine
Jean Cocteau
#83. I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
Jean Cocteau
#84. 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
#85. We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
Jean Cocteau
#86. 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
#87. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
Jean Cocteau
#88. When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
Jean Cocteau
#90. The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
Jean Cocteau
#91. When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
Jean Cocteau
#92. Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
#93. Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
Jean Cocteau
#94. 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
#95. May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
Jean Cocteau
#96. We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
Jean Cocteau
#97. It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.
Jean Cocteau
#98. We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
Jean Cocteau
#99. Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Jean Cocteau
#100. Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Jean Cocteau
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