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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
Poetry
Inspirational
Writing
Abandoned
Never
Crafts
Life
Poem
Witty
Humorous
Finished

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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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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.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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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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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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