The Difficulty of Being Quotes

“I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“It is dangerous not to conform with people's image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me.
This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“Writing is an act of love. If it is not it is only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us.

The richness of the world is in its wastefulness.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“It is, it seems, a social crime to desire solitude.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream...
...if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“How admirable the attitude of one who has made good use of the time granted him and who did not interfere by trying to be his own judge. Duration of human life belongs to those who mould each moment, sculpture it and do not trouble about the verdict.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“I am neither cheerful nor sad. But i can be completely the one or completely the other to excess.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“INTRODUCTION”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“tapestries to real animals.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“work in which psychology”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“confusion”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“C’est la maison qui m’attendait.
J’en habite le refuge, loin des sonnettes du Palais-Royal. Elle me donne l’exemple de l’absurde entêtement magnifique des végétaux. J’y retrouve les souvenirs de campagnes anciennes où je rêvais de Paris comme je rêvais plus tard, à Paris, de prendre la fuite. L’eau des douves et le soleil peignent sur les parois de ma chambre leurs faux marbres mobiles. Le printemps jubile partout.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being

“I have known fantaisistes in whom phantasy was as it were organic and who died of it. I felt in them a kind of mild madness very dangerous both for themselves and for their friends. Despite the respect which all existence that does not spare itself inspires in us, none the less they fill us with uneasiness. For these fantaisistes are usually mythomaniacs, and sometimes their aim is to hold not our attention but our hearts. If they succeed in this, it means that they are neither frivolous nor given to phantasy, but that they appear so because of their clumsiness in convincing us, from a modesty of spirit which impels them to try to appear exceptional, from a desire to enter into our scheme of things from their remorse at having thought themselves indiscreet. This remorse inveigles them into flights, into total eclipses, into punishments which they inflict upon themselves and of which I could quote appalling instances. The world in which they live makes contact with them very difficult for us, since the least word, the least gesture on our part (and which we thought of no significance) sets in motion in them incredible deviations which may lead them even to suicide. One must therefore shun them from the beginning, however much they may beguile us in a world where fire is rare and never fails to attract us.”
― Jean Cocteau, The Difficulty of Being