P Valery Quotes & Sayings

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph. — Paul Valery

An alone man is always badly accompanied. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one. — Bill Bryson

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

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'
The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'
Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.
'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder. — Paul Valery

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? — Paul Valery

You can't build a society purely on interests, you need a sense of belonging — Valery Giscard D'Estaing

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

At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind. — Paul Valery

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself. — Stephen Spender

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

Pulled out my Valery Gergiev trump card and said I would have to call him about getting another hotel. There are many ways in which a soprano relies upon the guidance of a conductor, and not all of them are confined to the stage. As a result of dropping the most powerful name in Russian music today, I got a window and a view. — Renee Fleming

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

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker. — Paul Valery

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

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

I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and through a determined analysis of definite and previously prescribed conditions, whatever its value might be once it had been produced, did not leave the mind of its creator without having modified him, and forced him to recognize and in some way reorganize himself. I said to myself that it was not the accomplished work, and its appearance and effect in the world, that can fulfill and edify us; but only the way in which we have done it. — 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

In the morning when he opened his eyes and when his glance fell upon the yellow linen of the curtain by the window, it seemed to him that its yellowness was suffused with the crimson of dark desire and that there was some strange and eerie tenseness in it. It seemed that the sun was insistently and fervently concentrating its burning and bitter rays towards this linen pierced by a golden color and summoning and demanding, and disturbing. And in reply to this fascinating external tension of gold and crimson the veins of the Youth were filled with a fiery agitation. His muscles were suffused with a resilient strength and his heart became like a spring of ardent fires. Sweetly pierced by millions of exciting, burning and arousing needles he leapt up from the bed and with a childlike gleeful laugh he began to leap and dance around the room without dressing.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

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

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. — Paul Valery

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