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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
Business
Art
Political
People
Preventing
Politics

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We are wont to condemn self-love but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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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.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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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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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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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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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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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.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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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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At times I think and at times I am.
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