Paul Valery Art Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.