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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Paul Valery

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Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Massacre
Massacres
Antiwar
Profit
Killing
Poetry
War
People

More quotes by Paul Valery

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A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.
Paul Valery
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
Paul Valery
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Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
Paul Valery
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valery
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Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Paul Valery
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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
Paul Valery
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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
Paul Valery
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Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
Paul Valery
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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valery
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
Paul Valery
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I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
Paul Valery
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History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
Paul Valery
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery
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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
Paul Valery
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
Paul Valery
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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
Paul Valery
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery