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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

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
Constantly
Danger
Order
Two
World
Threaten
Dangers
Disorder

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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
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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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It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
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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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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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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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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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 dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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