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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

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
Truth
Must
Made
Long
Years
Truths
Flesh
Pass
Become

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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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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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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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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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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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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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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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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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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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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