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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

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
Poetry
Impossible
Almost
Wells
Everything
Well
Must

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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
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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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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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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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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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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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Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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