Jean Cocteau Quotes

People don't know how to be outrageous anymore.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.

For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

You're not allowed to be an eccentric in the world, you have to fit it.

I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints - the sinners are much more fun.

The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

You ask me, brother, why am I in here. Brother, why are you not in here?

Societies have been conditioned to believe that entertainers are just that, but I refuse to be put into the box of a puppet.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

Larry Summers is to modesty what Madonna is to Chastity.

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

I wish I dared dispense with all costume. Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely; but Mrs. Grundy would be furious - it would never do.

If you're still doing what mommy and daddy said for you to do (go to school, get a job, and save money), you're losing.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.