Quotes by Jean Cocteau
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
The joy of youth 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.
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go to far.
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.
That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
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.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
