Paul Valery Quotes

The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

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

The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

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

...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.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

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

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

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

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

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

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

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.

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

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

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

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

Do you not realise that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?

In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.

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.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

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

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

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

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.

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?

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

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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.

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

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.

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

The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.