Explore Quotes by Jean Cocteau

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.

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

The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.

One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love

A little too much is just enough for me.

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.

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

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.

May the devil himself splatter you with dung.

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.