Valery Quotes

#1. When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

Bill Bryson

#2. God created everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through" (Paul Valery).

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

#3. I have my hair done by Valery Joseph, who does a version of the Palm Beach crash helmet so that it doesn't move.

Marjorie Gubelmann

#4. Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

Stanley Kunitz

#5. When I was young, Tchaikovsky was ruined for me by conductors who made it slick and treacly. Hearing Valery Gergiev conduct Tchaikovsky has been a revelation - he brings out all its raw passion. And Gergiev with the super-virtuoso LSO - well, it's just the perfect combination.

Charles Hazlewood

#6. Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

Stephen Spender

#7. How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague?

Paul Valery

#8. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Paul Valery

#9. 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

#10. It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.

Paul Valery

#11. 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

#12. Cognition reigns but does not rule.

Paul Valery

#13. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery

#14. Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Paul Valery

#15. Power without abuse loses its charm.

Paul Valery

#16. The universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

Paul Valery

#17. Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.

Paul Valery

#18. To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Paul Valery

#19. Work is never finished, only abandoned.

Paul Valery

#20. 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

#21. Politeness is organized indifference.

Paul Valery

#22. All that we know, that is, all we have the power to do, has finally turned against what we are.

Paul Valery

#23. Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed?

Paul Valery

#24. The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

Paul Valery

#25. Stupidity is not my strong point.

Paul Valery

#26. The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Paul Valery

#27. History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Paul Valery

#28. A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Paul Valery

#29. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Paul Valery

#30. 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

#31. Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

Paul Valery

#32. A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Paul Valery

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Paul Valery

#37. What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Paul Valery

#38. The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

Paul Valery

#39. Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Paul Valery

#40. Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

Paul Valery

#41. I am the only medium for your fears.

Paul Valery

#42. An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

Paul Valery

#43. Taste is made of a thousand distastes

Paul Valery

#44. To penetrate one's being, one must go armed to the teeth.

Paul Valery

#45. There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

Paul Valery

#46. Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Paul Valery

#47. Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

Paul Valery

#48. What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Paul Valery

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. O thoughtful waste of my days! What an artist I have destroyed!

Paul Valery

#52. Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

Paul Valery

#53. That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Paul Valery

#54. Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Paul Valery

#55. Peace is a virtual, mute, sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds

Paul Valery

#56. Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

Paul Valery

#57. To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

Paul Valery

#58. All my life I have preserved in the depths of my heart a live faith in my Creator, the Defender of the World, in His Sanctifying Grace and in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ our Saviour, but never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations.

Valery Bryusov

#59. 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.

Paul Valery

#60. No one is intimidated by logic, except logicians.

Paul Valery

#61. 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

#62. History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect.

Paul Valery

#63. 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

#64. The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Paul Valery

#65. The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.

Paul Valery

#66. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated

Paul Valery

#67. Let's be clear about this. The rejection of the constitution was a mistake that will have to be corrected.

Valery Giscard D'Estaing

#68. Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

Paul Valery

#69. 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

#70. What is more important than the meal? Doesn't the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn't all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit's triumph over a raging appetite?

Paul Valery

#71. Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.

Paul Valery

#72. The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!

Paul Valery

#73. My poems mean what people take them to mean.

Paul Valery

#74. Every ironist has in mind a pretentious reader, mirror of himself.

Paul Valery

#75. Every man expects some miracle - either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.

Paul Valery

#76. 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

#77. To live means to lack something at every moment

Paul Valery

#78. Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Paul Valery

#79. If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

Paul Valery

#80. God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Paul Valery

#81. Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

Paul Valery

#82. Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

Paul Valery

#83. You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

Paul Valery

#84. Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Paul Valery

#85. 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

#86. Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.

Paul Valery

#87. The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted. There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.

Paul Valery

#88. Stupidity is not my strong suit.

Paul Valery

#89. A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.

Paul Valery

#90. 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

#91. The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.

Paul Valery

#92. It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.

Paul Valery

#93. If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.

Paul Valery

#94. Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.

Paul Valery

#95. Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation.

Paul Valery

#96. 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

#97. What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

Paul Valery

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.

Paul Valery