Jean Cocteau Quotes

It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.

It is, it seems, a social crime to desire solitude.

Life is a horizontal fall.

J'exige un vrai bonheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contrée où le soleil alterne avec la lune, où les saisons se déroulent en ordre, où de vrais arbres portent de vrais fruits, où de vrais poissons habitent les rivières, et de vrais oiseaux le ciel, où la vrai neige découvre de vraies fleurs, où tout sort est vrai, vrai, véritable. J’en ai assez de cette lumière morne, de ces campagnes stériles, sans jour, sans nuit, où ne survivent que les bêtes féroces et rapaces, où les lois de la nature ne fonctionnent pas.

Disavow anyone who provokes or accepts the extermination of a race to which he does not belong.

Vivre est une chute horizontale

My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me.
This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.

La mode, c'est ce qui se démode.

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

Le cinéma, c'est l'écriture moderne dont l'encre est la lumière.

The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think we are choosing, and we have no choice.

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

Die meisten Menschen leben in den Ruinen ihrer Gewohnheiten.

Art is science made clear.

Classifiable things reek of death. You must strike out in other spheres . . . quit the ranks. That's the sign of masterpieces and heroes. An original, that's the person to astonish and to rule.