Jean Cocteau – 29 Quotes

29 Quotes by Jean Cocteau

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.

– Jean Cocteau

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

– Jean Cocteau

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

– Jean Cocteau

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

– Jean Cocteau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

– Jean Cocteau

Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.

– Jean Cocteau

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

– Jean Cocteau

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

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

– 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 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.

– Jean Cocteau

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.

– Jean Cocteau

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.

– 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, the finish by loading honors on your head.

– Jean Cocteau