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
Topics: Yin, Try, Society, Body, Honor, Fail
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
Topics: Mystery
The extreme limit of wisdom—that’s what the public calls madness.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Wisdom, Madness, Mind
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Music
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Imitation
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
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Manners
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
Topics: Art, Fashion
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art
Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Life is a horizontal fall.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Living, Life
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
Topics: Dreams
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Lying, Deception/Lying, Lies
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Public, People
Tact is knowing how far to go too far.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Tact
Art is science made clear.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
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
Topics: Adversity
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Books, Literature
The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Museums
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Death, Dying
Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Luck
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Style
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Innovation, Originality
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
Topics: Wealth
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
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Carpe-diem
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
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
Topics: Poets, Poetry
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
—Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Obedience
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Michel Houellebecq French Author
- Victor Hugo French Novelist
- Anatole France French Novelist
- Remy de Gourmont French Poet, Writer
- Guillaume Apollinaire Italian-born French Poet
- Sacha Guitry French Actor, Dramatist
- Marcel Proust French Novelist
- Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
- Arthur Rimbaud French Poet
- Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
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