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What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

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
Complicated
Understood
Wrong
Simple
Cannot

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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
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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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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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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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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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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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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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At times I think and at times I am.
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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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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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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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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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