Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Author
Jean Cocteau
37 quotations
About Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century and highly influential on the Surrealist and Dadaist movements, among others. The National Observer suggested that "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man".
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Jean CocteauThe extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
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 l…
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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.
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre whi…
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 oth…
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.