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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
Must
Poetry
Impossible
Almost
Wells
Everything
Well

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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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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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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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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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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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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
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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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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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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 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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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