Jean Cocteau Quotes

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.

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

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

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

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

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

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

Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.

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

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.

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

When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.

The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

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

Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.

Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

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

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.

I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.

The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.

Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.