Valery Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

An alone man is always badly accompanied. — Paul Valery

Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon
and falsehood, which is her armor. — 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

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. — 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

How can one not feel enthusiasm for the man who never said anything vague? — 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

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

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

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

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

Poems are never finished - just abandoned — Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated. — 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

Taste is made of a thousand distastes — 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

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of 'contemporary'. There are moments and places in history to which 'we moderns' could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous ... creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassailable. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

All my life I have preserved in the depths of my heart a live faith in my Creator, the Defender of the World, in His Sanctifying Grace and in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ our Saviour, but never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations. — Valery Bryusov

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 have sown a seed ... Instead of a half-formed Europe, we have a Europe with a legal entity, with a single currency, common justice, a Europe which is about to have its own defence. — Valery Giscard D'Estaing

What is more important than the meal? Doesn't the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn't all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit's triumph over a raging appetite? — Paul Valery

We hope vaguely but dread precisely. — Paul Valery

Toward an eternal aspiration for vague things. — Valery Larbaud

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. — Paul Valery

Stupidity is not my strong point. — Paul Valery

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

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

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. — Paul Valery

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. — 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

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts. — 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

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. — Paul Valery

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

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know. — Paul Valery

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

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. — 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

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

Skilled verse is the work of a profound skeptic. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am . — 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

All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. — Paul Valery

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

It is only by chance that we are reminded of the permanent circumstances of our life. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

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. — 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

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art. — Paul Valery

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun. — Paul Valery

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

Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself. — Paul Valery