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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.

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
Clear
History
Order
Obtain
Thought
Immediate
Even
Deeply
Time
Necessary
Meaning
Study

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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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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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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.
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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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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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Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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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 poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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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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