Paul Valery
Paul Valery
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valérywas a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 October 1871
CountryFrance
photography eye thanks
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.
photography letters moments
From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.
photography simple historical-knowledge
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?
photography giving-up giving
Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
photography names vision
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
simple
Everything that is simple is theoratically false, everything that is complicated is pragmatically useless.
deeply moment others
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
future
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
people
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
god shows void
God made everything out of the void, but the void shows through
consumed energy power ten ultimate uses
The ultimate ""computer,"" our own brain, uses only ten watts of power -- one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.
civilization knows mortals
We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.
equality men people
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
quality world size
In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.