Quotes by Jean Cocteau

“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”

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

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

“A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, th...”

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

“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 see...”

“I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.”

“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.”

“Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.”

“Art is science made clear.”

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

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

“Paris, howeverbecause of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenementsParis yields herself in disco...”

“Be yourself. The world worships the original.”

“plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations”

“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 withstan...”

“To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed ...”

“One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.”

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

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