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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.

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
Remember
Grow
Best
Tree
Indefinitely
Growing
Placed
Grows
Plot
Nations
Soil
Though
Spread
Nature
Continue
Light
Conditions

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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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It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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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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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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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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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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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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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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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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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being 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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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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