Quotes By Jean Cocteau

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

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

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

Life is a horizontal fall.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

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

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

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.

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

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

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

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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.