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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.

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
Cannot
Mathematics
Anything
Size
Without
Increase
Geometry
World
Physical
Quantity
Figures
Similar
Exist
Mathematical
Pure
Math
Quality
Changing

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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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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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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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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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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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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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The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
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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 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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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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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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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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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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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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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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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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