Success Quote by Jean Cocteau

Luck is Cocteau's polite word for a darker pleasure: the need to explain away other people's wins without granting them merit. The line lands because it pretends to be a humble confession ("I believe...") while actually exposing a petty reflex most people recognize in themselves. It's a joke with teeth. You laugh, then feel caught.

The mechanics are elegant. Cocteau takes a lofty concept - luck, that talisman we invoke to make the world feel less arbitrary - and weaponizes it as a defense against envy. The punch comes from the pivot: "how else can you explain..". The premise isn't that luck governs success; it's that resentment demands an alibi. If someone you admire succeeds, it's talent, grit, vision. If someone you can't stand succeeds, the mind reaches for cosmic accounting: chance, connections, timing, an unfair universe. Luck becomes a moral solvent.

Context matters. Cocteau moved through early-20th-century Paris, an ecosystem of rivals, salons, and reputations made and broken on gossip as much as work. In that milieu, "success" was never purely aesthetic; it was social capital. His quip reads like a survival tool for a scene where artists constantly had to metabolize others' acclaim. It's also Cocteau the aesthete puncturing the romantic myth of the artist as purely generous. The subtext: we're not just judging art; we're managing our own status anxiety.

The line endures because it frames envy as rationalization, not sin - a comic self-diagnosis that still stings in an age of algorithmic popularity and public metrics.