God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.Paul Valery
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.Paul Valery
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.Paul Valery
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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.Paul Valery
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To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.Paul Valery
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The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.Paul Valery
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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.Paul Valery
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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
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A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.Paul Valery
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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.Paul Valery
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.Paul Valery
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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.Paul Valery
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.Paul Valery
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This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or.. inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life - which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.Paul Valery
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The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.Paul Valery
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.Paul Valery
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Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.Paul Valery
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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.Paul Valery
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