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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.

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
Except
Surprising
Humans
Beings
Error
Nothing
Among
Mutual
Believe
Mistake
Errors
Always
Happy
Contrary
Never
Natural
Harmony
Anything
Fruit
Agrees
Agree
Misunderstanding
Human

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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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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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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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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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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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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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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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
Paul Valery
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to live means to lack something at every moment
Paul Valery