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Poems are never finished - just abandoned

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
Abandoned
Poems
Finished
Never

More quotes by 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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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
Paul Valery
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
Paul Valery
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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
Paul Valery
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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 Valery
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valery
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It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
Paul Valery
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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
Paul Valery
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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 Valery
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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?
Paul Valery
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Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
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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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
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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.
Paul Valery
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
Paul Valery
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
Paul Valery
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
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The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
Paul Valery