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

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau

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

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
Jean Cocteau

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Jean Cocteau

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
Jean Cocteau

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

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.
Jean Cocteau

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Jean Cocteau

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

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

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.
Jean Cocteau

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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