All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau suggests that music’s power is not purely abstract: even when it has no explicit program, it carries an echo of the lived realities that gave rise to it—places, gestures, emotional states, or images in the composer’s mind. “Resembles something” does not mean literal imitation (like sound effects), but an oblique, hard-to-define likeness that listeners can feel without being able to name. The “mysterious resemblance” points to art’s capacity to translate experience into form: music moves us because it preserves traces of its originating motives, and we respond to those traces with our own memories and feelings. The remark aligns with Cocteau’s broader modernist interest in how art transforms reality rather than merely representing it.