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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

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
Power
Stems
Verse
Stem
Verses
Harmony
Poetry
Says
Art
Indefinable

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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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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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A poem is never finished, 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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Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
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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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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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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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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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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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