Jean Cocteau Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“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.”

“If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

“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.”

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

“Silence moves faster when it's going backward.”

“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 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.”

“Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.”

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