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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
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Photographed
True
Meditation
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Historical
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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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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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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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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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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Everything changes but the avant-garde.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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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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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
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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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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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