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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

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
Serious
Ideas
Never
People

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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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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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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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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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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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At times I think and at times I am.
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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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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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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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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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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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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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