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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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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
Things
Accustomed
Thanks
Clearly
Photography
Grew
Learned
Nonexistent
Seen
Hitherto
Eye
Anticipate

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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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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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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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Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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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.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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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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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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