Jean Cocteau Quotes
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness. The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. 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. The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. The poet doesn't invent. He listens. The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed. The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up. The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul. There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them. There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard. True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing. We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like? What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you. Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself. When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work. You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
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