Paul Valery Men Quotations

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.