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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
Makes
Despair
Beauty

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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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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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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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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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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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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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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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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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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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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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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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