Jean Cocteau quotes - page 2

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. (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
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
Jean Cocteau
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Jean Cocteau
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
Jean Cocteau
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
Jean Cocteau
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. (Jean Cocteau)
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
Jean Cocteau
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
Jean Cocteau
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
Jean Cocteau
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Jean Cocteau
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. (Jean Cocteau)
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Jean Cocteau
The joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
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