Jean Cocteau Quotes

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.

The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.

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 withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

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

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.

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 abode, has to carry its luggage with it.

Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence ... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.

I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.
I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame":
Once upon a time ...

How admirable the attitude of one who has made good use of the time granted him and who did not interfere by trying to be his own judge. Duration of human life belongs to those who mould each moment, sculpture it and do not trouble about the verdict.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being
very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.

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

I am burning myself up and will always do so.

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

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ... We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

Living is a horizontal fall.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.

Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.

Life is a horizontal fall.

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.

The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

A picture is not a window ... an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

My only politics have been friendship.

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.

I was delighted to hear that a number of people returned to see Orphée (as much as five or six times), to the amazement of the managements. This is significant, for the cinema is usually regarded as a place where one drops in for a little entertainment as one would for a glass of beer.
This is why film societies, those Courts of Appeal, have so important a part to play, and why they deserve all the support we can give them. This is why I accepted nomination as President of the fédération des Cinéclubs. But, alas, even film societies are sometimes unable to retrieve old films, which the industrial squall sweeps away in order to clear a space for new ones. We had imagined that great actresses like Greta Garbo would be granted the privilege which was denied to a Rachel or a Sarah Bernhardt. But we were wrong. Today it is impossible to show Garbo in The lady of the Camelias for instance, to the young people who could not see the film when it came out, for all the copies have been meticulously destroyed. The lady of the Camelias is to be remade with new stars and new methods, using all the latest technical inventions, colour, three dimensions, and what not. It is a real disaster. Mrs B., the head of the new York Film Library, finds herself confronted with the same difficulties as Langlois of the Cinémathèque française whenever she endeavours to save a film from oblivion. She finds that she cannot obtain a single copy. Chaplin alone escapes that terrible destruction, because h

Jacques' life was like the rooms of Montmartre women that are never cleaned because they get up at four o'clock and slip a coat over their nightgown to go downstairs and eat.

Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.

Many years ago, as I was glancing through a catalogue of jokes for parties and weddings, I saw an item, 'An object difficult to pick up'. I haven't the slightest idea what that 'object' is or what it looks like, but I like knowing that it exists and I like thinking about it.
A work of art should also be 'an object difficult to pick up'. It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don't know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh. The less it's understood, the slower it opens its petals, the later it will fade. A work of art must make contact, be it even through a misunderstanding, but at the same time it must hide its riches, to reveal them little by little over a long period of time. A work that doesn't keep its secrets and surrenders itself too soon exposes itself to the risk of withering away, leaving only a dead stalk.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

The cinema is death at work.

Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard.

Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.

In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.

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

What is style? Saying complicated things in a simple way.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

I have come to realize that the rhythm of the film is one of narrative. I am telling the story. It is as if I were hidden behind the screen, saying: "Then such and such a thing happened." The characters don't seem to be living a life of their own, but a life that is being narrated. Perhaps that's how it should be in a fairy tale.

Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.

One should always talk well about oneself! The word spreads around and in the end, noone remembers where it started

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

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

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.

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 rest is literature.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.

The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.

A picture neither saddening nor gladdening I fear; neither beautiful nor ugly.

Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

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!

Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture ... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless ...

The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.