Quotes from Jean Cocteau

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. What he does is to subject them to treatment which ensures their having the finest colour and the sweetest scent.

To cut the Gordian knot is not the same as to untie it. Children and lunatics cut what the poet patiently spends his life in trying to untie.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

The cinema is death at work.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Vivre est une chute horizontale