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 COCTEAUBeauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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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.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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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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Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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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.
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Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
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We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
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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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
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One must not mistake majority for truth.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
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Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
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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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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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