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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

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
Light
Like
Feather
Feathers
Bird

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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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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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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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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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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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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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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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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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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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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.
Paul Valery
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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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