Jean Cocteau Quotes
Most popular Jean Cocteau Quotes
Art is science made clear.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Poetry is a religion without hope.
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.
Tact consists in knowing how far we may go too far.
The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Tact consists in knowing how far to go in going too far.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I couldn't say.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
The cinema, a somewhat dubious Muse . . . incapable of waiting, whilst all the other Muses wait, and should be painted and sculpted in waiting poses.
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 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, they finish by loading honors on your head.
I listen to a jazz band at the Casino de Paris: high in the air, in a kind of cage, the Negroes writhe, dandle, toss lumps of raw meat to the crowd in the form of trumpet screams, rattles, drumbeats. The dance tune, broken, punched, counterpointed rises now and again to the surface.
