Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
JEAN COCTEAUYou’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
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