Top 200 Jean Cocteau Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Find first, seek later.”

— Jean Cocteau

102. “Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.”

— Jean Cocteau

103. “The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”

— Jean Cocteau

104. “I am burning myself up and will always do so.”

— Jean Cocteau

105. “In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.”

— Jean Cocteau

106. “The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

108. “I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.”

— Jean Cocteau

109. “Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.”

— Jean Cocteau

110. “The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.”

— Jean Cocteau

111. “In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God’s masterpiece to be a mistake.”

— Jean Cocteau

112. “Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”

— Jean Cocteau

113. “A half empty bottle of wine is also half full, but half a lie will never be half true.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

115. “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 perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.”

— Jean Cocteau

116. “The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.”

— Jean Cocteau

117. “Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.”

— Jean Cocteau

118. “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

119. “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!”

— Jean Cocteau

120. “Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.”

— Jean Cocteau

121. “El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.”

— Jean Cocteau

122. “Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.”

— Jean Cocteau

123. “Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.”

— Jean Cocteau

124. “Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.”

— Jean Cocteau

125. “I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.”

— Jean Cocteau

126. “Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.”

— Jean Cocteau

127. “We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.”

— Jean Cocteau

128. “To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.”

— Jean Cocteau

129. “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

130. “Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.”

— Jean Cocteau

131. “Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.”

— Jean Cocteau

132. “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

133. “Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.”

— Jean Cocteau

134. “It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.”

— Jean Cocteau

135. “The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.”

— Jean Cocteau

136. “If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”

— Jean Cocteau

137. “Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.”

— Jean Cocteau

138. “Everyone’s pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.”

— Jean Cocteau

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Beauty makes one lose one’s head. Poetry is born of this decapitation.”

— Jean Cocteau

142. “The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.”

— Jean Cocteau

143. “Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.”

— Jean Cocteau

144. “Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.”

— Jean Cocteau

145. “Imitate, and what is personal will eventually come despite yourself.”

— Jean Cocteau

146. “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

147. “I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.”

— Jean Cocteau

148. “The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.”

— Jean Cocteau

149. “The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.”

— Jean Cocteau

150. “Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.”

— Jean Cocteau