Jean Cocteau Quotes

Living is a horizontal fall.

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

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

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

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

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.

Be yourself. The world worships the original.

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

Art is science made clear.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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

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

I am a lie that always speaks the truth.

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

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

I am burning myself up and will always do so.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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.

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

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.

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

A little too much is just enough for me.

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.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

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

There is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.

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

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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

Vivre est une chute horizontale

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

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

May the devil himself splatter you with dung.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you don't like?

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

Il n'y a pas d'amour, il n'y a que des preuves d'amour.

No se debe confundir la verdad con la opinión de la mayoría.

Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir un peu plus avant de renvoyer les images.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

« From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look. » Casey McQuiston. « Red, White & Royal Blue. » Apple Books.

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

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.

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.

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.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious... Poetry is a religion without hope.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think we are choosing, and we have no choice.

It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.

Le cinéma, c'est l'écriture moderne dont l'encre est la lumière.

Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look.

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.

À force de ne jamais réfléchir, on a un bonheur stupide.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

La mode, c'est ce qui se démode.

We only serve as a model to the portrait of our fame

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

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

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming.

I grant you that, if you'll admit, as I do, that we are pawns of an unknown force that lives within us that dictates our actions and compels us to speak this language.

Imitate, and what is personal will eventually come despite yourself.

Die meisten Menschen leben in den Ruinen ihrer Gewohnheiten.

En France, on a d'abord considéré la bonté comme une forme de la bêtise, la méchanceté comme une forme de l'intelligence. Maintenant la politesse est considérée comme du temps perdu.

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

The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind.

The obstinate miner of the void exploits his fertile mine

A picture neither saddening nor gladdening I fear; neither beautiful nor ugly.

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.

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.

Tu dis que tu aimes les fleurs et tu leur coupes la queue, tu dis que tu aimes les chiens et tu leur mets une laisse, tu dis que tu aimes les oiseaux et tu les mets en cage, tu dis que tu m’aimes alors moi j’ai peur.

I constantly regretted having to cut out bits of intense poetry. But one mustn't, at any cost, be seduced by an attractive idea if it hasn't got its right place.

J'aime les chats parce que j'aime ma maison. Et qu'ils en deviennent peu à peu l'âme visible.

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

Writing is an act of love. If it is not it is only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us. The richness of the world is in its wastefulness.

J'exige un vrai bonheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contrée où le soleil alterne avec la lune, où les saisons se déroulent en ordre, où de vrais arbres portent de vrais fruits, où de vrais poissons habitent les rivières, et de vrais oiseaux le ciel, où la vrai neige découvre de vraies fleurs, où tout sort est vrai, vrai, véritable. J’en ai assez de cette lumière morne, de ces campagnes stériles, sans jour, sans nuit, où ne survivent que les bêtes féroces et rapaces, où les lois de la nature ne fonctionnent pas.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal… unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.

It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream... ...if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me. This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.

Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever.