Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.
Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.
Disavow anyone who provokes or accepts the extermination of a race to which he does not belong.
Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
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...
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
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.
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
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.