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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
Value
Introduce
Question
Suggests
Knowledge
Introducing
Values
Historical
Simple
Notion
Fact
Mere
Narrated
Facts
Photography
Photographed
True
Meditation
Genesis

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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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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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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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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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No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
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The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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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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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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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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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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