Paul Valery Quotations

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

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

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

At times I think and at times I am.

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

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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

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.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

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

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

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

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

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.

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

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

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

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

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

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

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.

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

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

God made everything out of the void, but the void shows through

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Everything that is simple is theoratically false, everything that is complicated is pragmatically useless.

The ultimate ""computer,"" our own brain, uses only ten watts of power -- one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

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.

In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

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

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

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.

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

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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

Power without abuse loses its charm.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

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

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.

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.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Stupidity is not my strong suit.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished a word that for them has no sense but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

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

Love is acting stupid together.

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.

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

...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.

Whoever wants to accomplish great things must devote to a lot of profound thought to details.

Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.

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.

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

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.

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.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

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.