328 Quotes by Jean Cocteau

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

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms.

Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

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

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.

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, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: “Paul’s dying; Paul’s going to die”′ but he did not believe it. Paul’s death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

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

El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.

I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.