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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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
Art
Vanishes
Poem
Meaning
Poetry

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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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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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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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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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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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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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