110+ Jean Cocteau Quotes (Surreal, Poetic And Innovative)

Jean Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. He is best remembered for his avant-garde films, such as The Blood of a Poet (1930), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1950). He was also a major contributor to the Surrealist movement, and is known for his unique blend of fantasy, surrealism, and poetic realism.

Top 10 Jean Cocteau Quotes

1. The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
2. Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
3. Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
4. The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
5. The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
6. Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
7. Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
8. If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
9. Living is a horizontal fall.
10. An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Jean Cocteau Image Quotes

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. — Jean Cocteau

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect. — Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau Short Quotes

• Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
• I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
• A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
• An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
• The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
• French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
• We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
• What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
• Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
• In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

Jean Cocteau Famous Quotes And Sayings

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. — Jean Cocteau

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect. — Jean Cocteau

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. — 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

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

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

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative. — Jean Cocteau

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you. — Jean Cocteau

Life is a horizontal fall. — Jean Cocteau

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

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel. — Jean Cocteau

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

There's no such thing as love; only proof of love. — Jean Cocteau

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

The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth. — Jean Cocteau

See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation. — Jean Cocteau

A film is a petrified fountain of thought. — Jean Cocteau

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house. — Jean Cocteau

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

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence. — Jean Cocteau

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work. — Jean Cocteau

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

You have comfort. You don't have luxury. And don't tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have NO Fear or Discomfort. — Jean Cocteau

Poetry is a religion with no hope. — Jean Cocteau

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

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. — Jean Cocteau

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. — Jean Cocteau

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. — Jean Cocteau

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for. — Jean Cocteau

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

The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. — Jean Cocteau

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system. — Jean Cocteau

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead. — 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 poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed. — Jean Cocteau

Silence moves faster when it's going backward. — 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

Tact is knowing how far to go too far. — Jean Cocteau

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture. — Jean Cocteau

Art is science in the flesh. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves. — Jean Cocteau

Art is science made clear. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

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

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. — Jean Cocteau

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

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly. — Jean Cocteau

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. — 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

There are poets and there are grownups. — Jean Cocteau

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting. — 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

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept. — Jean Cocteau

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness. — Jean Cocteau

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

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. — Jean Cocteau

I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition. — Jean Cocteau

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

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. — Jean Cocteau

The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality. — Jean Cocteau

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

It was the East that should have sent us missionaries. — Jean Cocteau

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

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

A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility. — Jean Cocteau

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail. — Jean Cocteau

Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous. — Jean Cocteau

Life Lessons by Jean Cocteau

1. Jean Cocteau taught us that creativity can be found in the most unexpected places, and that it is important to look at the world with a fresh perspective.
2. He also showed us that success is not defined by the opinions of others, but rather by our own personal standards.
3. Lastly, Cocteau taught us that it is important to take risks and to never be afraid to challenge the status quo.