Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
JEAN COCTEAUBeauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
JEAN COCTEAUDo as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
JEAN COCTEAUEvery day in the mirror I watch death at work.
JEAN COCTEAUWhat the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
JEAN COCTEAUArt is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
JEAN COCTEAUIt is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
JEAN COCTEAUI have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
JEAN COCTEAUFight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
JEAN COCTEAUA true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
JEAN COCTEAUThe only way to kill death is through photography.
JEAN COCTEAUThe dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
JEAN COCTEAUThe extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
JEAN COCTEAUFrench people are Italian people in a bad mood.
JEAN COCTEAUEverything 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 COCTEAUAnything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
JEAN COCTEAUPoetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAU