Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
“The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity,… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share Image
Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience… — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike? — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live. — Jean Cocteau Copy Share
