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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
Men
Precise
Leads
Often
Ideas
Nothing

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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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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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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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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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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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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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