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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

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
Every
Always
Believed
False
Everywhere
Atheism
Belief
Chance
Everyone

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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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The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
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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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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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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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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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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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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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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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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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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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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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