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

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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.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
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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.
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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
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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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What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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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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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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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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