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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valéry
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Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.
Paul Valéry
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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 Valéry
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If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.
Paul Valéry
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Everyman has his back to his death, like the talker leaning against the mantelpiece.
Paul Valéry
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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valéry
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God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valéry
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valéry
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The wind is rising... we must attempt to live.
Paul Valéry
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A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
Paul Valéry
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valéry
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The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, … since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.
There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
Paul Valéry
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For direct feeling, [erudition] substitutes theories, for the marvellous actuality an encyclopedic memory; and the immense museum is further saddled with a limitless library. Venus becomes a document.
Paul Valéry
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Without religions the sciences would never have existed. For the human brain would not have trained itself to range beyond the immediate, ever — present "facts" of appearance which, for it, constitute reality.
Paul Valéry
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A faultily observed fact is more treacherous than a faulty train of reasoning.
Paul Valéry
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A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.
Paul Valéry
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Space is an imaginary body, as time is fictive movement. When we say "in space" or "space is filled with" we are positing a body.
Paul Valéry
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"Cleverness" is transmuted into "genius" when it takes the form of a simplification.
Paul Valéry
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If a bird could say exactly what he sings, why he sings it, and what, within himself, is singing, he would not sing.
Paul Valéry
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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 Valéry
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Small unexplained facts always contain grounds for upsetting all explanations of "big" facts.
Paul Valéry
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Nearly all the books I prize, and absolutely all that have been of any use to me, are books that don't make easy reading.
Paul Valéry
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Thought is bisexual; it both inseminates and conceives itself.
Paul Valéry
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Much confusion in science, and in everything else, arises from this, that men who have no capacity for thought will presume to theorise, because they cannot see that mere stores of knowledge, however vast, in themselves give no capacity for thinking.
Paul Valéry
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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.
Paul Valéry
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Paul Valéry
Creative Commons
Born:
October 30, 1871
Died:
July 20, 1945
(aged 73)
Bio:
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.
Known for:
Monsieur Teste (1896)
Le cimetière marin (1923)
La jeune Parque
Selected Writings of Paul Valery
The outlook for intelligence
Most used words:
mind
man
science
art
language
sign
accident
god
commerce
work
values
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