Quotes By Jean Cocteau

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

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.

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.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

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.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

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