Jean Cocteau Quotes

For me, exploration is about that journey to the interior, into your own heart. I'm always wondering, how will I act at my moment of truth? Will I rise up and do what's right, even if every fiber of my being is telling me otherwise?

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

For discovering one's true inner nature, I think one should try to take out some time, with quiet and relaxation, to think more inwardly and to investigate the inner world. That may help.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn't decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

A novel is a journey into your own soul, and you seek there to discover those things that you share with all others.

It's in every person's life, around 27 to 29 years old, the stars and the planets align themselves to exactly the way they were when you were born. You're faced with yourself. There's no running away.

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.

I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself.

A lot of people go on this journey of finding themselves and then eventually realize that their true self wasn't on the outside but it's always been there.

We must at times search our own souls and discover what we really are. Our real character, much as we would wish, cannot be hidden.

The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I.

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

Following your feelings will lead you to their source. Only through emotions can you encounter the force field of your own soul.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.

One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.

The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly must with his unrest, uncertainty, and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ.

I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.

An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

I felt at some point that I had nothing to lose, and [laughs] maybe I was wrong. I think, you know, there's always these little autobiographical secrets behind things. I think I was really attacking my earlier self, and this kind of pretentious figure.