Paul Valery Quotes & Sayings

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. — Paul Valery

Sometime I think; and sometime I am. — Paul Valery

The deeper education consists in unlearning one's first education. — Paul Valery

Love is acting stupid together. — Paul Valery

I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among them, striving to see all things just as I see them at this very moment. I then placed Wisdom in the eternal station which now is ours. But from here all is unrecognizable. Truth is before us, and we no longer understand anything at all. — Paul Valery

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

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

What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention ... How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely? — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

Work is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery

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

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

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions. — Paul Valery

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

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning. — Paul Valery

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

I am the only medium for your fears. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences. — Paul Valery

At times I think and at times I am. — Paul Valery

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

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

To live means to lack something at every moment — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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

Stupidity is not my strong suit. — Paul Valery

Life blackens at the contact of truth. — Paul Valery

Love is being stupid together. — Paul Valery

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal. — Paul Valery

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

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

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language. — Paul Valery

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

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing. — Paul Valery

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

The wind is rising... we must attempt to live. — Paul Valery

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. — Paul Valery

The stranger's way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being - belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition. — Paul Valery

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives. — Paul Valery

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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

Power without abuse loses its charm. — Paul Valery

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything. — Paul Valery

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

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

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind. — Paul Valery

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

We hope vaguely but dread precisely. — Paul Valery

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

Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated — Paul Valery

Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed? — Paul Valery

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences. — Paul Valery

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

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

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? — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic. — Paul Valery

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography. — Paul Valery

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

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken. — Paul Valery

No one is intimidated by logic, except logicians. — Paul Valery

By giving the name of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politeness is organized indifference. — Paul Valery

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

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable. — Paul Valery

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! — Paul Valery

Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

Conscience reigns but it does not govern. — Paul Valery

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

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! ... — Paul Valery

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

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

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