Quote

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.

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
Doe
Aroused
Nothing
Soon
Writing
Exist
Meet
Follow
Path
Inscription
Beautiful
Infernal
Thought
Inscriptions

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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 great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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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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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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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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Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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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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