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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
Simple
Cannot
Complicated
Understood
Wrong

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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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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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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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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 man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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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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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 one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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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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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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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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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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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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