328 Quotes by Jean Cocteau

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

Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the “filthy Jew”: he was coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.

Since it’s now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.

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.

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

I constantly regretted having to cut out bits of intense poetry. But one mustn’t, at any cost, be seduced by an attractive idea if it hasn’t got its right place.

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.

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

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God’s masterpiece to be a mistake.