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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
More quotes by Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Paul Valery
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
Paul Valery
Stupidity is not my strong suit.
Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Paul Valery
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
Paul Valery
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery