Jean Cocteau Quotes

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

The circumstances, including my body and my parents, whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

You must overcome death by finding God in it.

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.

If there is confusion in your head and in your heart, what more do you want! A man who no longer loves and no longer errs should have himself buried straight away.

I have written too much about lives - I feel I have lived for too long.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

My theory is that the way you cope with the depths will ascertain the heights that you reach - they are intimately connected - and if you have a lust for life, you are also going to have a lust for death.

I'm a sinner just like everybody else and I have my faults and I've been through my dark times in my life to where I wasn't walking the walk and talking the talk, or I may have been talking the talk, but I wasn't walking the walk.

To me death is not a fearful thing. It's living that's cursed.

Defeat the fear of death and you welcome the death of fear.

If you've done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do? I think that that's where life stops.

Man is lost and is wandering in a jungle where real values have no meaning. Real values can have meaning to man only when he steps on to the spiritual path, a path where negative emotions have no use.

The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go.

You get rid of the fear of death by understanding that it is an integral fact of our existence. You do that through will and reason.

Every being has flaws; the potential is always there to connect to the light or to darkness.

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?