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It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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
Defend
Affection
Law
Means
Another
Nature
Mean
More quotes by Paul Valery
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery
to live means to lack something at every moment
Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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.
Paul Valery
Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
Paul Valery
The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
Paul Valery
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
Paul Valery
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
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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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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Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Paul Valery
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
