Explore Quotes by Jean Cocteau

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.

The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent: as laughter.

The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.

Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.

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.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.

One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

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

It is not inspiration; it is expiration.

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

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

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

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

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

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

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.