Paul Valery Quotes:

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

Topics: Dream, Positive Thinking, Way, Pursue Your Dreams, Dreamy

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!...

Topics: Heart, Islands, Grace

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

Topics: Book, Animal, Weather, Humidity

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

source: - "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Time, Future, Trouble, Great Future

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Topics: Thinking, Men, Complicated

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

Topics: Peace, Greed, Victory

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

Topics: Science, Profound, Structure, Symmetry

At times I think and at times I am.

Topics: Time, Thinking, Timeliness

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

Topics: Psychics, Ironic, Empowerment

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

source: - "Mauvaises Pensées et Autres". Book by Paul Valery, 1941.

Topics: Stupid, Intelligent, Want, Intelligent Women

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

Topics: Photography, Names, Vision

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.

Topics: Dream, Memories, People, Repose

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

Topics: Ideas, People, Serious

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

Topics: Betrayal, Kind, Fidelity

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

Topics: Order, History, Study

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

Topics: Ideas, Giving, Psychology, Social Psychology

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

Topics: Art, Business, People

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

Topics: Art, Artist, Artistic, Inspirational Artist, Creative Artists

Love is being stupid together.

Topics: Love, Romantic, Valentines Day, Togetherness, Being Stupid

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

Topics: Spiritual, Loneliness, Drinking

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

Topics: Light, Bird, Should

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Topics: Inspirational, Differences, Mutual

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

Topics: Art, Poetry, Fruit

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

Topics: Art, Poetry

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

Topics: Positive, Ends, Consequence, Beginnings And Ends, Starting Anew

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

Topics: Art, Poetry, Harmony, Indefinable

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

Topics: Art, Ideas, Poetry

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.

Topics: Attitude, Mind, Lines, Righteous Indignation

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.

source: - Bizarre, issues 24-31, (p. 102), 1962.

Topics: War, People, Poetry, Massacres, Killing Each Other

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.

Topics: Men, Two, Together, Systems Of Government, Living Together

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

Topics: Beauty, Beautiful

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

Topics: Dream, Silence, Triumph

to live means to lack something at every moment

Topics: Mean, Moments

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

Topics: Dread

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?

Topics: Real, Boredom, People, Incoherence, Sudden Change

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

Topics: Important, Emotion

Power without abuse loses its charm.

Topics: Abuse, Charm, Loses

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

Topics: Order, Two, World, Order And Disorder

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

Topics: Attitude, Reality, Judging, Judgment Of Others, Judging Others

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

Topics: Mind, Teeth, Needs

Politeness is organized indifference.

source: - "Tel Quel". Book by Paul Valery, 1943.

Topics: Indifference, Politeness, Organized

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

Topics: Advantage, Freshness, Loses

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

Topics: Despair

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.

Topics: Sorry, Men, Giving, Venom, Feeling Sorry

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Topics: Thinking, Sometimes

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

Topics: Giving, Balance, World

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

Topics: Loss, Men, Lost Friendship

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

Topics: Simple, Complicated, Understood

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

source: - Tel Quel 1 "Moralites" (1941)

Topics: Women, Loneliness, Solitude

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

Topics: Rights, Society, Moments, Social Systems

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

Topics: Being Yourself, Being Single, Men, Sound Mind, Insanity And Sanity

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.

source: - Regards sur le Monde Actuel (1931)

Topics: Men, Equality, People

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

Topics: Men, Ideas, Doing Nothing

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

Topics: Love, Relationship, Distance, Long Distance Relation

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

Topics: Advice, Traps, Bounds

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

Topics: Reality, Men, Keeping Secrets

History is the science of what never happens twice.

Topics: Happens

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

Topics: Inspirational, Profound, Details, Profound Thoughts

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.

Topics: Writing, Vocabulary, Mind, Hamper

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

Topics: Mean, People

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

Topics: Courage, Long, Needs

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

Topics: Light, Mindfulness, Sun

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

Topics: Love You, Ego, Hateful, Love Your Neighbor, Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

source: - Talk on BBC Radio, January 13, 1976.

Topics: Dance, Journey, Hiking

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Witty, Poetry By Famous Poets, Abandoned Buildings

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Writing, Doe

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

Topics: Art, Abandoned, Art Is

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

Topics: Powerful, Adjectives, Advertising

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.

Topics: Block, Men, Want, Eyelids

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

Topics: Used, Used To Be

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

Topics: Truth, Years, Long

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

source: - "The Collected Works of Paul Valéry: History and politics", translated by D. Folliot and J. Mathews, 1971.

Topics: Crush, Strong, Weak

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

Topics: Doe, Reign, Conscience

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

Topics: Atheism, Chance, Belief

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.

Topics: Education, Ignorance, Men

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

source: - Regards sur le Monde Actuel (1931)

Topics: Giving, Example, Want

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

Topics: Dog, Atheist, Men

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.

Topics: Small Numbers, Soul, Use

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.

Topics: Hate, Mean, Self, Loving Others, Losing Ourselves

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

Topics: Successful, Recipes, Collections

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.

Topics: Real, Facts

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

Topics: Genius, Talent

Love is acting stupid together.

Topics: Stupid, Love Is, Acting

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

Topics: Men, Skins, Surface

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.

source: - "Collected Works", vol. 1, translated by David Paul, 1972.

Topics: Death, Satisfaction, Needs

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

Topics: Mean, Views, Point Of View

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.

Topics: Art, Poetry, Disappear

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Topics: Appreciation, Differences, Reciprocate

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

Topics: Men, Miracle, Mind

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

Topics: Honesty, Simple, Useless

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.

source: - "The Art of Poetry". Book by Paul Valery, 1958.

Topics: Art, Destiny, Men

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

Topics: Writing, Differences, Hands

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

Topics: Dance, Metamorphosis, Realising

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

Topics: Passion, Tension

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

Topics: Fall, Science, Moon

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

source: - "Charmes ou poèmes". Book by Paul Valery, 1922.

Topics: Wind, Rising

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."

source: - "Littérature". Book by Paul Valery, 1930.

Topics: Idols, Essence, Principles

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

Topics: Past, Thinking, Reason, Incomparable

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.

Topics: Attitude, Justice, Judging

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.

Topics: Giving, Effort, Everyday

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.

Topics: Love, Heart, Self

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

Topics: Math, Quality, World

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

Topics: Order, Disorder, Human Condition

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.

source: - "Moralités". Book by Paul Valery, 1932.

Topics: Art, Lying, Science

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.

Topics: Failure, Succeed, Transformation

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.

Topics: Art, Men, Ideas

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

Topics: Doe, Reign, Cognition

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

source: - "La Crise de l'Esprit". Book by Paul Valery, 1919.

Topics: Civilization, Knows, Mortals

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

Topics: People, Evil, Insulting

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.

source: - "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (pp. 167-168), 1931.

Topics: Spiritual, Art, Ideas, Spiritual Values, Locality

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.

Topics: Knowledge, World, Blind

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

Topics: Avant Garde, Things Change

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.

Topics: Mistake, Believe, Errors

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.

source: - "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 55), 1931.

Topics: Giving, Mind, Firsts

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.

source: - "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci". Book by Paul Valery, 1895.

Topics: Truth, Honesty, Spring

Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This is a precious gift.

Topics: Ignorance, Men, Precious Gifts

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.

Topics: Light, Tree, Plot

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

Topics: Reality, Dancer, Hybridity, Hybrid, Calculators

We must always apologize for talking painting.

Topics: Expression, Talking, Apologizing

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.

Topics: Order, Two, Police, Two Extremes

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.

source: - "Collected Works", vol. 1,("Recollection"), 1972.

Topics: Eye, Reflection, Irritation

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.

source: - "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 156), 1931.

Topics: Fate, Mind, These Days

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

Topics: Teeth, Penetrate

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

Topics: Simple, Hands, Water, Minimal Effort, Auditory

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

Topics: Pain, Loss, Golden, Golden Hour

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

source: - 'Moralitès' (1932) p. 41

Topics: Mean, Successful, Science

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.

Topics: Writing, Numbers, Unexpected

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

Topics: Impossible, Said, Wells

...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.

Topics: Song, Hands, Musical, Power Of Language

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.

Topics: Nerves, Looks, Lions

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.

Topics: Mean, Sincerity, Sincere

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

Topics: Photography, Giving Up, Giving

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

Topics: Truth, Enough, Gross

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.

source: - "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci". Book by Paul Valery, 1895.

Topics: Art, Eye, Men

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

Topics: Reality, Hands, Wells

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

Topics: May, Absurd

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Topics: Science

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

Topics: Thinking, Sometimes, Thoughts And Thinking

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

Topics: Thinking

The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

Topics: Men, Ideas, Mind, Repaying

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

source: - "Dialogues" by Paul Valery, translated by William McCausland Stewart, Bollingen Series XLV 4/Princeton University Press, (p. 27), 1921.

Topics: Dream, Struggle, Soul

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

Topics: Degas, Way, Bears

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.

Topics: Photography, Eye, Thanks

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Topics: Abandoned, Finished

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

Topics: Motive, Settlement, Treaties, Ulterior Motive

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

Topics: Mean, Law, Affection

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.

source: - "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 42), 1931.

Topics: Mean, Men, Expression

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

Topics: Men, Mad, Portraits

The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.

Topics: Oracles, Folly, Oneself

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

source: - "The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe" by Julian Symons, (Pt. 1, Epilogue), 1978.

Topics: Mistaken, Impeccable

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.

source: - "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 156), 1931.

Topics: Mind, World, Firsts, Bartering, E Commerce

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.

Topics: Photography, Letters, Moments

Stupidity is not my strong suit.

source: - "Monsieur Teste". Book by Paul Valery, 1919.

Topics: Strong, Stupidity, Suits

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?

Topics: Photography, Simple, Historical Knowledge, True Value