Jean Cocteau Quotes

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.

It is only the consciousness of a nonexistence which allows us to realize for moments that we are living.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Each second of life is a miracle

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Life is but a web spun of ghosts and dreams and illusions.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidts the night of non-being.

Suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?

Consciousness is the grave of things, the place where they cease to exist, beyond which they end. And when they have ended, it seems that they no longer have any essential existence except in the visions in me.

What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle.

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it

We live and die in the midst of marvels.

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.

The thing is to appreciate the fragile wonder of it all, down to the last breath, down to the dying embers of consciousness.

Many people are alive but don't touch the miracle of being alive.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.