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