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

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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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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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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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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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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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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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