Quotes from Jean Cocteau

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

Art is science made flesh.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

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.

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

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

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

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

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

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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.

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

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall.

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

Life is a horizontal fall.

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

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

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

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

One sits down first one thinks afterwards.

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.