Jean Cocteau Quotes

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

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

J'exige un vrai bonheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contrée où le soleil alterne avec la lune, où les saisons se déroulent en ordre, où de vrais arbres portent de vrais fruits, où de vrais poissons habitent les rivières, et de vrais oiseaux le ciel, où la vrai neige découvre de vraies fleurs, où tout sort est vrai, vrai, véritable. J’en ai assez de cette lumière morne, de ces campagnes stériles, sans jour, sans nuit, où ne survivent que les bêtes féroces et rapaces, où les lois de la nature ne fonctionnent pas.

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

The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think we are choosing, and we have no choice.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious... Poetry is a religion without hope.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal… unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.

Le cinéma, c'est l'écriture moderne dont l'encre est la lumière.

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

My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me.
This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

À force de ne jamais réfléchir, on a un bonheur stupide.