Quotes By Jean Cocteau

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

Life is a horizontal fall.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

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

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

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

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.

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.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

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

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.

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

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

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

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

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.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

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

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

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.

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

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

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.