Paul Valery Quotes

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

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

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

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

Love is acting stupid together.

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

Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

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.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

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.

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.

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

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

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

Politeness is organized indifference.

The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

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

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.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

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

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

What is simple is false and what is not is useless.

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

We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.

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.

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.

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

At times I think and at times I am.

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

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.

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.

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

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