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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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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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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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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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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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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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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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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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