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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
Cannot
Complicated
Understood
Wrong
Simple

More quotes by Paul Valery

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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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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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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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The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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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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There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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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 disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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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.
Paul Valery
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History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
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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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
Paul Valery
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A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.
Paul Valery
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery