Top 200 Jean Cocteau Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

106. “Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

108. “Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

110. “Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

113. “The artist must know how far to go too far.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

115. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

119. “My only politics have been friendship.”

— Jean Cocteau

120. “Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.”

— Jean Cocteau

121. “Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

123. “Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.”

— Jean Cocteau

124. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

126. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

130. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

133. “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

134. “Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”

— Jean Cocteau

135. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

141. “I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”

— Jean Cocteau

142. “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.”

— Jean Cocteau

143. “Since it’s now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.”

— Jean Cocteau

144. “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

145. “It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

147. “See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan’s deflation is another’s inflation.”

— Jean Cocteau

148. “All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms.”

— Jean Cocteau

149. “My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau