Top 100 Paul Valery Quotes
#1. How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague?
Paul Valery
#2. 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.
Paul Valery
#3. Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon
and falsehood, which is her armor.
Paul Valery
#5. The universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.
Paul Valery
#6. Work is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
#7. What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.
Paul Valery
#8. All that we know, that is, all we have the power to do, has finally turned against what we are.
Paul Valery
#10. The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery
#11. History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery
#12. A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
Paul Valery
#13. 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
#14. A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery
#15. 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.
Paul Valery
#16. Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.
Paul Valery
#17. Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
Paul Valery
#18. An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valery
#19. The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
Paul Valery
#21. There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
Paul Valery
#22. Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
#23. Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
Paul Valery
#24. A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
Paul Valery
#25. What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valery
#26. Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.
Paul Valery
#27. Peace is a virtual, mute, sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds
Paul Valery
#28. To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.
Paul Valery
#29. No one is intimidated by logic, except logicians.
Paul Valery
#30. A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
Paul Valery
#31. History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect.
Paul Valery
#32. The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.
Paul Valery
#33. Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.
Paul Valery
#34. I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
Paul Valery
#35. Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.
Paul Valery
#36. For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.
Paul Valery
#37. Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Paul Valery
#38. God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valery
#39. Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
Paul Valery
#40. Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.
Paul Valery
#41. 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.
Paul Valery
#42. The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
Paul Valery
#43. What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
Paul Valery
#44. You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.
Paul Valery
#45. If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
Paul Valery
#46. There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.
Paul Valery
#47. This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind.
Paul Valery
#48. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.
Paul Valery
#49. To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.
Paul Valery
#50. Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.
Paul Valery
#51. We must always apologize for talking painting.
Paul Valery
#52. 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.
Paul Valery
#53. Everything changes but the avant-garde.
Paul Valery
#54. That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery
#55. As for the world, all reality has no other excuse for existence except to offer the poet the chance to play a sublime match against it
a match that is list in advance.
Paul Valery
#56. An alone man is always badly accompanied.
Paul Valery
#57. To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.
Paul Valery
#58. The confused murmur of his nights began to rise, expected but not familiar
Paul Valery
#59. God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly
Paul Valery
#60. 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
#61. A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones.
Paul Valery
#62. Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
#63. O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is All cannot be sufficient unto itself!
Paul Valery
#64. At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.
Paul Valery
#65. Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.
Paul Valery
#66. An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
Paul Valery
#67. In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
#68. By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death.
Paul Valery
#69. Science is a collection of successful recipes.
Paul Valery
#70. [Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
#71. The stranger's way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being - belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition.
Paul Valery
#72. Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.
Paul Valery
#73. No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
Paul Valery
#74. We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
Paul Valery
#75. But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind.
Paul Valery
#77. The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
#78. My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.
Paul Valery
#79. Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself.
Paul Valery
#80. What soul would hesitate to turn the universe upside down in order to be a little more itself?
Paul Valery
#81. Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.
Paul Valery
#82. Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valery
#83. If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Paul Valery
#84. One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
Paul Valery
#85. The wind is rising... we must attempt to live.
Paul Valery
#86. 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
#87. Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.
Paul Valery
#88. It is only by chance that we are reminded of the permanent circumstances of our life.
Paul Valery
#89. Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Paul Valery
#90. In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
Paul Valery
#91. The best way to make your own dreams come true is to wake up
Paul Valery
#92. A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.
Paul Valery
#93. What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
#94. I would hear the song of the columns and visualize in the pure sky the monument of a melody.
Paul Valery
#95. One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.
Paul Valery
#96. The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valery
#97. I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.
Paul Valery
#98. Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.
Paul Valery
#99. She is entirely in her closed eyes, and quite alone with her soul, in the bosom of the most intimate attention ... She feels in herself that she is becoming some event.
Paul Valery
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