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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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
Thinking
Infinitely
Complicated
Thoughts
Men

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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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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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Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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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.
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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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