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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

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
Incomprehensible
Freshness
Advantage
Loses
Never

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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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.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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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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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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
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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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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.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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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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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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