Jean Cocteau Quotes About Unconscious, Marriage, Handwriting, Comfort

Jean Cocteau Quotes:

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau

Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
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

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

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
Jean Cocteau

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
Jean Cocteau

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

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

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Jean Cocteau

The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau

The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
Jean Cocteau

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

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Jean Cocteau

Life is a horizontal fall.
Jean Cocteau

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

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
Jean Cocteau

Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau

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

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau

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