Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at 10:46AM
Drew Wolfe

Jean Cocteau

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

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

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model...

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time...

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

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death...

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.

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