It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

— Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau Quotes

You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.

— 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 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.

— Jean Cocteau

It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

— Jean Cocteau

Paris, however – because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements – Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.

— Jean Cocteau

I constantly regretted having to cut out bits of intense poetry. But one mustn’t, at any cost, be seduced by an attractive idea if it hasn’t got its right place.

— Jean Cocteau

How admirable the attitude of one who has made good use of the time granted him and who did not interfere by trying to be his own judge. Duration of human life belongs to those who mould each moment, sculpture it and do not trouble about the verdict.

— Jean Cocteau

What is style? Saying complicated things in a simple way.

— Jean Cocteau

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.

— Jean Cocteau

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

— Jean Cocteau

There is neither magic nor master’s eye. Only a great deal of love and a great deal of work.

— Jean Cocteau

A half empty bottle of wine is also half full, but half a lie will never be half true.

— Jean Cocteau

Listen very carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the reviewers don’t like; it may be the only thing in your work that is original and worthwhile.

— Jean Cocteau

Delicious was not a term applicable to anything below the crust of that volcano, whose heady vapors numbed his ravished senses.

— Jean Cocteau

Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the “filthy Jew”: he was coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.

— Jean Cocteau

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

— Jean Cocteau

Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.

— Jean Cocteau

Opium resembles religion insofar as a magician resembles Jesus.

— Jean Cocteau

It is, it seems, a social crime to desire solitude.

— Jean Cocteau

I am neither cheerful nor sad. But i can be completely the one or completely the other to excess.

— Jean Cocteau

When I think of all the books I have yet to read, I am sure that I am still happy.

— Jean Cocteau
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