Top 200 Jean Cocteau Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t confuse the truth with the opinion of the majority.”

— Jean Cocteau

Featured in: History Quotes

2. “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

— Jean Cocteau

3. “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

4. “French people are Italian people in a bad mood.”

— Jean Cocteau

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— Jean Cocteau

Featured in: Music Quotes, Aesthetic Quotes

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

— Jean Cocteau

7. “Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”

— Jean Cocteau

8. “A little too much is just enough for me.”

— Jean Cocteau

9. “Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.”

— Jean Cocteau

10. “Be yourself. The world worships the original.”

— Jean Cocteau

11. “The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.”

— Jean Cocteau

Featured in: Hilarious Quotes

12. “Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.”

— Jean Cocteau

13. “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

14. “The only way to kill death is through photography.”

— Jean Cocteau

15. “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

— Jean Cocteau

16. “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

17. “Living is a horizontal fall.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

19. “There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.”

— Jean Cocteau

20. “The cinema is death at work.”

— Jean Cocteau

21. “Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall.”

— Jean Cocteau

22. “If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.”

— Jean Cocteau

23. “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

24. “What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.”

— Jean Cocteau

25. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

27. “Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.”

— Jean Cocteau

28. “The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.”

— Jean Cocteau

29. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

31. “A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”

— Jean Cocteau

32. “I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.”

— Jean Cocteau

33. “Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.”

— Jean Cocteau

34. “Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.”

— Jean Cocteau

35. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.”

— Jean Cocteau

36. “What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.”

— Jean Cocteau

37. “What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.”

— Jean Cocteau

38. “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”

— Jean Cocteau

39. “And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.”

— Jean Cocteau

40. “The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.”

— Jean Cocteau

41. “There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.”

— Jean Cocteau

42. “What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

— Jean Cocteau

43. “The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.”

— Jean Cocteau

44. “If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.”

— Jean Cocteau

45. “Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you’ll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

47. “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

48. “It is not inspiration; it is expiration.”

— Jean Cocteau

49. “One must not mistake majority for truth.”

— Jean Cocteau

50. “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