Paul valery quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Politeness is organized indifference.

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

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

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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 wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.

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

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

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

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

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.

At times I think and at times I am.

...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.

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

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

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

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

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.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

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.

Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.

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

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!

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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

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

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

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

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

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.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

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

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

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

We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.

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

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

to live means to lack something at every moment

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.

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.

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

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.

Love is acting stupid together.

Love is being stupid together.

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.

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

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

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.

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

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

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

Power without abuse loses its charm.

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

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.

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

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

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.

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

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

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.

There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

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.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

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

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

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.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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.