Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Jean Cocteau (French Poet, Artist)

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963,) fully Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau, was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, and critic. His plays are noted for their striking blend of poetry, irony, and fantasy.

Born in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, Cocteau achieved success early with La Lampe d’Aladin (1909, ‘Aladdin’s Lamp,’) and exploited it. He ran the gamut of experience, first enjoying a spectacular conversion to Roman Catholicism through the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain.

This was followed by a scornful repudiation of Cocteau’s mentor, the use of opium, and a search for salvation through solitude. Nevertheless, he had astonishing success with whatever he touched and figured as a sponsor of Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Giorgio de Chirico, and the group of young French composers known as Les Six. Cocteau’s work was marked by the vivacity and pyrotechnic brilliance as an actor, director, scenario writer, novelist, critic, and artist. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1955.

Significant works are his novels Le Grand Écart (1923; Miscreant, 1925,) Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the Imposter, 1925,) Les Enfants terribles (1929; Children of the Game, 1929,) and plays Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921; The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, 1963,) Orphée (1926; Orpheus, 1933) and L’Aigle à deux têtes (1946; The Eagle has Two Heads, 1948.) His films include Le Sang d’un poète (1930, The Blood of a Poet,) La Belle et la Bête (1945, Beauty and the Beast,) Orphee (adapted from his play, 1949) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean Cocteau

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Imitation

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Defects, The Body

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art

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
Topics: Men

I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Angels

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Critics, Criticism

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

Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Poets, Poetry

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

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

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Luck

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

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art

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: Body, Try, Fail, Society, Yin, Honor

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Literature, Books

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
Topics: Drugs, Illusion, Alcohol

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

To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Manners

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Youth

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Live-now, Past and Present

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

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
Topics: Drugs

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

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

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

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

Art is science made clear.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Dying, Death

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