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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

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
Preventing
Politics
Business
Art
Political
People

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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.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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At times I think and at times I am.
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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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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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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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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.
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The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
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A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
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