Jean Cocteau Quotes Page 2

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

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ”

“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.”

“The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.”

“The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”

“There is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.”

“There is no love, there are only proofs of love.”

“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”

“To live is a horizontal fall.”

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

“Truth should not be confused with majority's opinion.”

“Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”

“Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.”

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

“What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.”

“When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.”

“When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly.

A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly.

We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.”

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

“In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets.

One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.”

“Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.”

“Living is a horizontal fall.”

“We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.”

“Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.”

“I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.”

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

“The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.”

“I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.”