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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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
Often
Ideas
Nothing
Men
Precise
Leads

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At times I think and at times I am.
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It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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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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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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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.
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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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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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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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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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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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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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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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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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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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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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