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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

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
Delineate
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Attempt
Photography
Give
Giving
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More quotes by Paul Valery

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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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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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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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to live means to lack something at every moment
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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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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 are wont to condemn self-love but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
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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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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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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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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
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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.
Paul Valery
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Paul Valery