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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

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
Artist
Art
Work
Abandons
Really
Finishes
Never
Artistry
Abandon
Artistic
Merely

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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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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
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A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
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Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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to live means to lack something at every moment
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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.
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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