Jean Cocteau Quotes

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.

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

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.

It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.

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 poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

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

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

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

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.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.

One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

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

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

Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

It is not inspiration; it is expiration.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

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.

It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo