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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
Wrong
Simple
Cannot
Complicated
Understood

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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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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
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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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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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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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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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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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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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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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