Jean Cocteau Quotations

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

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

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

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.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

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

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

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.

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

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

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

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

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.

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

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

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

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

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.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

When a work of art appears to be in advance of its period, it is really the period that has lagged behind the work of art

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Vistor Hugo.

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

That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist.

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

Tact consists in knowing how far to go too far

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie

We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.

My only politics have been friendship.

The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.

Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.

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

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.

Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.

Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.

Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

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

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.

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

Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

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.

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.

Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.

The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.

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.

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.

Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

The artist must know how far to go too far.

Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.

Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

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.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

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

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.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation