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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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
Poetry
Art
Vanishes
Poem
Meaning

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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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 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 wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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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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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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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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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
Paul Valery
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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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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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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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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
Paul Valery
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery
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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
Paul Valery
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery