Jean Cocteau Quotes

“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”

“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”

“Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.”

“Living is a horizontal fall.”

“The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness.”

“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”

“Art is science made clear.”

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

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

“Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”

“Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.”

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”

“I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love”

“Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.”

“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”

“Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.”

“If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.”

“Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility.”

“Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired.”

“It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory…”

“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model”

“History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.”

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

“The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.”

“If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.”

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”

“What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart?
It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.”

“The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”

“I am a lie who always speaks the truth.”

“I am burning myself up and will always do so.”

“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.”

“All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms”

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

“I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.”

“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

“One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.”

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

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

“When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.”

“The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”

“A little too much is just enough for me.”

“Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”

“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!”

“An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.”

“Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.”

“What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.”

“Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.”

“one should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started”

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

“A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.”

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

“One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”

“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.”

“Allow the power of the soul to grow as flagrant as the power of sex.”

“Disavow anyone who provokes or accepts the extermination of a race to which he does not belong.”

“Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.”

“Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal… unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself.”

“Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?”