Quote

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
Lose
Specialist
Loses
Specialty
Force
Specialists
Better
Lesser
Thing
Delicate
Make
Appears
Never
Discover
Despair
Finesse

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent: as laughter.
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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
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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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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
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The cinema is death at work.
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
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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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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
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And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
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Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
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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.
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My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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