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Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Jean Cocteau
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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
Designer
Film Director
Illustrator
Librettist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
Prosaist
Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Never
Discover
Despair
Finesse
Lose
Specialist
Loses
Specialty
Force
Specialists
Better
Lesser
Thing
Delicate
Make
Appears
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Jean Cocteau
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.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
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