True Poet Quotes by Jean Cocteau

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

— Jean Cocteau

I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.

— Jean Cocteau

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience…

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

— Jean Cocteau

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

— Jean Cocteau

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

— Jean Cocteau

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

— Jean Cocteau

“Vivre est une chute horizontale”

— Jean Cocteau

I expect a black silence that is almost as violent as laughter.

— Jean Cocteau

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

— Jean Cocteau

If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

— Jean Cocteau

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau

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

— Jean Cocteau