Jean Cocteau

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

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

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

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

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

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

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.

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

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

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

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

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