Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness.
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else — and failing.
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.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
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 craving for opium can be endured in a car.
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
This personal morality may appear to be immorality itself in the eyes of those who lie to themselves, or who live a life of confusion, in such a manner that, for them, a lie becomes the truth, and our truth becomes a lie...
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.