Jean Cocteau Reality Quotations

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.