Jean Cocteau's Quotes

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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.

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

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

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

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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

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

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

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

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

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

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.