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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?
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
Facts
Photography
Photographed
True
Meditation
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Historical
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More quotes by Paul Valery
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
Paul Valery
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
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
Paul Valery
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Paul Valery
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
History is the science of what never happens twice.
Paul Valery
The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
Paul Valery
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
Paul Valery
The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
Paul Valery
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
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
