Paul Valery Quotations

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

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

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

At times I think and at times I am.

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

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

God made everything out of the void, but the void shows through

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Everything that is simple is theoratically false, everything that is complicated is pragmatically useless.

The ultimate ""computer,"" our own brain, uses only ten watts of power -- one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.

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

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

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.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Love is being stupid together.

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.

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

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

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

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

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

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

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.

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

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

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

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

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!...

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.

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

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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

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

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

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.

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.

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

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Politeness is organized indifference.

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

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.

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

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

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

to live means to lack something at every moment

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

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.

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

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

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

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

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

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

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.

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.