Top 200 Jean Cocteau Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Since it’s now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.”

— Jean Cocteau

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.”

— Jean Cocteau

155. “All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms.”

— Jean Cocteau

156. “People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.”

— Jean Cocteau

157. “One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.”

— Jean Cocteau

158. “Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.”

— Jean Cocteau

159. “We only serve as a model for the portrait of our fame.”

— Jean Cocteau

160. “It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.”

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

162. “It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.”

— Jean Cocteau

163. “Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.”

— Jean Cocteau

164. “After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.”

— Jean Cocteau

165. “Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood – the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.”

— Jean Cocteau

166. “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

167. “Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.”

— Jean Cocteau

168. “Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.”

— Jean Cocteau

169. “I expect a black silence that is almost as violent as laughter.”

— Jean Cocteau

170. “One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.”

— Jean Cocteau

171. “A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.”

— Jean Cocteau

172. “There are poets and there are grownups.”

— Jean Cocteau

173. “Paris, however – because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements – Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.”

— Jean Cocteau

174. “There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.”

— Jean Cocteau

175. “The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.”

— Jean Cocteau

176. “He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.”

— Jean Cocteau

177. “After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.”

— Jean Cocteau

178. “Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.”

— Jean Cocteau

179. “Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.”

— Jean Cocteau

180. “Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.”

— Jean Cocteau

181. “A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.”

— Jean Cocteau

182. “I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.”

— Jean Cocteau

183. “And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.”

— Jean Cocteau

184. “The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.”

— Jean Cocteau

185. “Poetry is a religion with no hope.”

— Jean Cocteau

186. “Vivre est une chute horizontale.”

— Jean Cocteau

187. “Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.”

— Jean Cocteau

188. “One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”

— Jean Cocteau

189. “A child’s reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: “Paul’s dying; Paul’s going to die”′ but he did not believe it. Paul’s death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.”

— Jean Cocteau

190. “The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.”

— Jean Cocteau

191. “Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.”

— Jean Cocteau

192. “The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.”

— Jean Cocteau

193. “The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.”

— Jean Cocteau

194. “Opium resembles religion insofar as a magician resembles Jesus.”

— Jean Cocteau

195. “My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.”

— Jean Cocteau

196. “I feel myself inhabited by a force or being – very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.”

— Jean Cocteau

197. “Respect movements, flee schools.”

— Jean Cocteau

198. “What is style? Saying complicated things in a simple way.”

— Jean Cocteau

199. “Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.”

— Jean Cocteau

200. “Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.”

— Jean Cocteau