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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

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
Book
Enemies
People
Weather
Content
Animals
Enemy
Fire
Animal
Books
Humidity

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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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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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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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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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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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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 man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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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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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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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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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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