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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

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
Simply
Successful
Literature
Aggregate
Means
Recipes
Science
Atheism
Mean
Rest
Always
Technology

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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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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 golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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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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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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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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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 most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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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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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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to live means to lack something at every moment
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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