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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.

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
Meaning
Alone
Kind
Translation
Translations
Fidelity
Betrayal

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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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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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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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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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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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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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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
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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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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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to live means to lack something at every moment
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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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