Best 188 quotes of Jean Cocteau on MyQuotes

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

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

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

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

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

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.

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

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.

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.

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

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Art is science in the flesh.

Art is science made flesh.

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

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

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.

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.

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

Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

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

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

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

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.

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

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.

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

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

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.

Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.

Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.

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.

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

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

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.

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

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

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

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.