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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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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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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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It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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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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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
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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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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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