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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

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
Vaguely
Dread
Precisely
Hope

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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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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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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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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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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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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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At times I think and at times I am.
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The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
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to live means to lack something at every moment
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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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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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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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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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