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.
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...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world order and disorder.
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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.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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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.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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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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Love is being stupid together.
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La politique est l'art d'empcher les gens de se mler de ce qui les regarde. (Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
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The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
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A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
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What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
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Books have the same enemies as people fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
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