Jean Cocteau Quotes

The cinema is death at work.

He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

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

The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.

Art is science made flesh.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

Art is science in the flesh.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

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

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

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

Living is a horizontal fall.

I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.

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.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

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

What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.

One must not mistake majority for truth.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

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

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

A little too much is just enough for me.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

You have comfort. You don't have luxury. And don't tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have NO Fear or Discomfort.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.

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... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.

A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

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