Jean Cocteau Quotes

The moment rules over everything.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

The hours, minutes and seconds stand as visible reminders that your effort put them all there. Preserve until your next run, when the watch lets you see how Impermanent your efforts are.

The present will not long endure.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

It's life isn't it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

Time stays, we go.

I think the life we are living now is just a blink in the eye of eternity.

You are either going forward or you are not.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

Unless you go forward then you are going back.

Today's news, which may be yesterday's anyway, will be eclipsed tomorrow.

Everything must change and you do what you can with the changes that are made. You can't stop it. You can't fight it. Everybody tries to go back to yesterday, but you can't go back to yesterday. The only time there is, is now.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Everything is dead while it lives.

There is no such thing as standing still.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.