Paul Valery Quotes

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.

I am the only medium for your fears.

Whatever we succeed in doing is a transformation of something we have failed to do. Thus, when we fail, it is only because we have given up.

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

Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

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

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.

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.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

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!

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

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

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

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

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

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

All classicism presupposes a romanticism that went before.

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.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

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

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

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

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

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.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

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

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

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

Love is being stupid together.

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.

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.

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.

But Socrates cannot but have been meditating upon something? ... Can he ever remain solitary with himself
and silent to his very soul!

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.

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

The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.

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.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

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

Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This is a precious gift.

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

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

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.

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

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.

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.

An alone man is always badly accompanied.

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

In song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself.

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.

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.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

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.

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

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

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.

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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.

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

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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

His heart is a desert island ... The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate him and guard him against the truth. He flatters himself that he is entirely alone there ... Patience, dear lady. Perhaps, one day, he will discover some footprint on the sand ... What holy and happy terror, what salutary fright, once he recognizes in that pure sign of grace that his island is mysteriously inhabited! ...

Stupidity is not my strong point.

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

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

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

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

The attentive reading of a book is really a continuous commentary, a succession of notes that emanate from the inner voice.

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

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.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

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

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of 'contemporary'. There are moments and places in history to which 'we moderns' could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous ... creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassailable.

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic.

What soul would hesitate to turn the universe upside down in order to be a little more itself?

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.

The wind is rising... we must attempt to live.

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.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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

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.

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

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

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.