Jean Cocteau Quotes

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

We know well that mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others than in one's own.

Wise is the man who does not disdain any character and instead, examining him with a searching look, plumbs him to the very main-springs of his being.

I don't really take a step back too often to see what's going on.

One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

The one thing I've tried to do is be insightful.

I'm the kind of person where I always digest everything around me.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

Before you attempt to set things right, make sure you see things right.

It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

What your glasse telles you, will not be told by Councell.

They only babble who practise not reflection.

I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.

I've been blessed with a good head on my shoulders and quite a good ability of discernment. I can see through people.

There's nothing wrong with being shallow as long as you're insightful about it.

So I observe life a little bit, rather than participating in it.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

Sometimes we can't see our own selves, our own shortcomings, but it's so easy to see somebody else's.

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

To contemplate is to look at shadows.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I was always an outsider, always standing outside, observing and trying to figure things out. Which is exactly what you need to do as a writer, I suppose.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.