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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

More quotes by Paul Valery

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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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 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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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
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Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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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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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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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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It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
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Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
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At times I think and at times I am.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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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.
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