Quotes by Jean Cocteau

About Jean Cocteau:

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929), and the films Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949). His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Albert Gleizes, Igor Stravinsky, Marie Laurencin, María Félix, Édith Piaf, Panama Al Brown, Colette, Jean Genet, and Raymond Radiguet.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream... ...if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Jean Cocteau

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.

Jean Cocteau

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Jean Cocteau

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Jean Cocteau

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Jean Cocteau

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

Jean Cocteau

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

Jean Cocteau

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

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 in...

Jean Cocteau

Jeannot la bêtise des amoureux est immense, végétale, animale, astrale. Que faire? Comment te faire comprendre que je n'existe plus en dehors de toi.

Jean Cocteau

plant it It will sprout But forget about the rustic festivities For the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal through the compact generations

Jean Cocteau

I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.

Jean Cocteau

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

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

Jean Cocteau

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Jean Cocteau

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

Jean Cocteau

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

Jean Cocteau

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

Jean Cocteau

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Jean Cocteau

Author Bio

  • NameJean Cocteau
  • DescriptionFrench poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
  • BornJuly 5, 1889
  • DiedOctober 11, 1963
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPainter; Playwright; Film Director; Poet; Choreographer; Illustrator; Novelist; Screenwriter; Writer; Composer; Librettist
  • AwardsCommander Of The Legion Of Honour