Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

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

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

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

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

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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