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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

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
Despair
Beauty
Makes

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The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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