It is not I who become addicted, it is my body. - (Cocteau, Jean - Addiction)

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house. - (Cocteau, Jean - Addiction)

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them. - (Cocteau, Jean - Adversity)

Art is science made clear. - (Cocteau, Jean - Arts and Artists)

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist. - (Cocteau, Jean - Arts and Artists)

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it. - (Cocteau, Jean - Asceticism)

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system. - (Cocteau, Jean - Automobiles)

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard. - (Cocteau, Jean - Beards)

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. - (Cocteau, Jean - Commonplace)

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you. - (Cocteau, Jean - Critics and Criticism)

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas. - (Cocteau, Jean - Crowds)

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead. - (Cocteau, Jean - Death and Dying)

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying. - (Cocteau, Jean - Death and Dying)

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends. - (Cocteau, Jean - Dreams)

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death. - (Cocteau, Jean - Drugs)