Life's Pleasures Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cocteau frames self-escape as a kind of do-it-yourself mythology: if you can’t live inside your own skin, you’ll invent a costume and call it a story. The bracing move is how casually he stacks “drugs, alcohol, or lies” in the same cupboard. Intoxication and deception aren’t opposites here; they’re sibling technologies for manufacturing distance from the self. The line “Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself” pivots from moralizing to diagnosis. It’s not that people are simply weak; it’s that interior life can be inaccessible, maybe even unbearable, so performance becomes the substitute for reflection.

The subtext is pure Cocteau: art is both salvation and self-evasion, and myth is the medium that makes the evasion feel noble. Myths don’t just hide us; they elevate the hiding. That’s why “lies and inaccuracy” aren’t condemned as sins so much as described as sedatives. They “give him a few moments of comfort” is a devastating demotion of the grand narratives we build around ourselves: not truth, not transformation, just temporary anesthesia.

Context matters. Cocteau worked in a 20th-century Europe that watched modernity shred old certainties, then tried to glue meaning back together with spectacle, ideology, and art. As a director steeped in Surrealism and theatrical illusion, he understood how images can both reveal and conceal. The intent isn’t to scold escapism; it’s to expose its mechanics, and to hint that our myths - personal, political, artistic - often begin as coping strategies before they harden into identities.