Quotes from Jean Cocteau

On went the cab, jogging through the open firmament. Stars came towards it, splintering the dim shower-whipped windows with fiery particles of light.

Their heritage of instability, extravagant caprice, and natural elegance was their paternal portion.

She did not thank him. She was accustomed to miracles and accepted them as part of daily life. She expected them to happen, and they always did.

Si votre maison brûlait, qu'emporteriez- vous ? – J'emporterais le feu.

Thus, love had taught her to decipher the mysteries of childhood.

It was then that the Room, like a great ship, put out to sea. Higher the waves, wider the horizons, rarer, more perilous, the cargo. In their strange world of childhood, of action in inaction, as in the waking dream of opium eaters, to stay becalmed could be as dangerous as to advance at breakneck speed.

Elisabeth would slip a coat on over her nightdress and sink down in a dream, one elbow on the table, her hand propping her cheek, in a pose reminiscent of some allegorical female figure, symbolizing Science, or Agriculture, or the Seasons. Paul lolled beside her, sketchily attired. They ate silently, like strolling players taking a rest between performances.

Dreams resound sometimes with footsteps, mindless, purposeful, like hers; dreams lend us a gait lighter than winged flight, a step able to combine the statue's weight of inorganic marble with the subaqueous freedom of a deep-sea diver.

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.

This was more than death, it was the heart's death.

Bresson est à part dans ce métier terrible. Il s'exprime cinématographiquement comme un poète par la plume. Vaste est l'obstacle entre sa noblesse, son silence, son sérieux, ses rêves et tout un monde où ils passent pour de l'hésitation et de la manie.

A half empty bottle of wine is also half full, but a half lie will never be half true

LE SPHINX - Vous avez réponse à tout. Hélas ! car vous l'avouerai-je, Å'dipe, j'ai une faiblesse : les faibles me plaisent et j'eusse aimé vous prendre en défaut.

Le tact dans l'audace, c'est de savoir jusqu'où on peut aller trop loin.

At the circus, a careless mother may let her child take part in the experiments of a Chinese magician. He puts him in a box. He opens the box; it's empty. He closes it again. He opens it; the child reappears and goes back to his seat. Now it is no longer the same child. Nobody doubts it.

Si vous voulez que je vous dise quel est le drâme de la poésie : c'est que la poésie est, malgré tout, un privilège aristocratique de naissance ; et que tous les privilèges conduise directement à la guillotine.

Puisque la beauté court je dois courir plus vite

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

Art is not a pastime, but a priesthood.

Quels sont mes vrais héros ? Des sentiments. Des figures abstraites qui n'en vivent pas moins et dont les exigences sont extrêmes.

J'ai la peau de l'âme trop sensible. Il faudrait apprendre à son âme à marcher pieds nus.

All the same, persons who base their calculations on the inexorable pressure of the force of circumstance assume, correctly, that such lives are doomed. The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies, but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heart-rending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

work in which psychology

Fashion dies very young, so we must forgive it everything.