Quotes from Jean Cocteau

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

May the devil himself splatter you with dung.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

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

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

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

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.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Die meisten Menschen leben in den Ruinen ihrer Gewohnheiten.

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