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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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
Life
Poem
Witty
Humorous
Finished
Poetry
Inspirational
Writing
Abandoned
Never
Crafts

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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.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
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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.
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
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If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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