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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.

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
Persons
Communicated
Person
Collapse
Would
Directly
Disappear
Effects
Poetry
Happened
Art

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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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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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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
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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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At times I think and at times I am.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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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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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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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.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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