Paul Valery Quotes

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.

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

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

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

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

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

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

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

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.

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

We must always apologize for talking painting.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

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.

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

to live means to lack something at every moment

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Love is acting stupid together.

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