Jean Cocteau > Quotes

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Art is science made clear.”
― Jean Cocteau

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like? ”
― Jean Cocteau

“Be yourself. The world worships the original.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.”
― Jean Cocteau

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
― 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, The Holy Terrors

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”
― Jean Cocteau

“I am a lie that always speaks the truth.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Living is a horizontal fall.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of His Cure

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

“An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”
― Jean Cocteau

“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”
― Jean Cocteau

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

“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

“I am burning myself up and will always do so.”
― 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

“Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo”
― Jean Cocteau

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ”
― Jean Cocteau

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

“All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms”
― Jean Cocteau

“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of His Cure

“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, Opium: The Diary of His Cure

“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, The Holy Terrors

“I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.”
― Jean Cocteau, The White Book

“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, Opium: The Diary of His Cure

“one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started”
― Jean Cocteau

“Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour.”
― Jean Cocteau

“A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.”
― Jean Cocteau

“I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“No se debe confundir la verdad con la opinión de la mayoría.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.”
― Jean Cocteau

“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”
― 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, The Holy Terrors

“When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.”
― Jean Cocteau

“We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of His Cure

“Vivre est une chute horizontale”
― Jean Cocteau

“Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir un peu plus avant de renvoyer les images.”
― Jean Cocteau

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.”
― Jean Cocteau

“What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.”
― Jean Cocteau

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

“Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.”
― Jean Cocteau

“À force de ne jamais réfléchir, on a un bonheur stupide.”
― Jean Cocteau

“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
― Jean Cocteau