Quotes from Jean Cocteau

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

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.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

One must not mistake majority for truth.

Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

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

Certainly I believe in luck. How else do you explain the success of those you don't like?

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

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

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 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.