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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.

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
Dangerous
Teaches
Teach
Precisely
History
Chemistry
Anything
Justify
Everything
Intellect
Furnishes
Nothing
Product
Examples
Products
Evolved
Example
Contains

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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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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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.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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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.
Paul Valery
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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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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.
Paul Valery
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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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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
Paul Valery
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It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.
Paul Valery
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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