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The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.

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
Give
Moderation
Giving
Stability
Great
Acquire
Make
Extremes
Acquires
World
Endure
Extremists
Balance
Endures
Value
Extremist
Values
Moderates

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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
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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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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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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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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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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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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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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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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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