Explore Quotes by Jean Cocteau

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.

There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.

I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

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.

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.

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

one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started

If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.