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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.

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
Simple
Useless
False
Honesty

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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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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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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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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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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 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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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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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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to live means to lack something at every moment
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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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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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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.
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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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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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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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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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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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