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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

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
Machinery
Remove
Immediately
Skin
Skins
Surface
Come
Men
Dissect

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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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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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A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
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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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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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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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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.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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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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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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