Paul Valéry > Quotes

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valery

“Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux réjouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!”
― Paul Valéry, Le cimetière marin / El cementerio marino

“Politeness is organized indifference.”
― Paul Valéry

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
― Paul Valéry

“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.”
― Paul Valéry

“Love is being stupid together.”
― Paul Valery

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
― Paul Valéry

“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”
― Paul Valéry

“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.”
― Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry

“Sometime I think; and sometime I am.”
― Paul Valéry

“God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly”
― Paul Valéry

“Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.”
― Paul Valéry

“To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.”
― Paul Valery

“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.”
― Paul Valery

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. ”
― Paul Valery

“The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!”
― Paul Valéry

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”
― Paul Valery

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.”
― Paul Valéry

“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.”
― Paul Valéry

“The deeper education consists in unlearning one's first education.”
― Paul Valéry, An Anthology

“to live means to lack something at every moment”
― Paul Valéry

“You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.”
― Paul Valéry, Selected Writings

“Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.”
― Paul Valéry

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”
― Paul Valery

“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?”
― Paul Valéry

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
― Paul Valéry

“My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!”
― Paul Valéry, Dialogues

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

“What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.”
― Paul Valéry

“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.”
― Paul Valéry, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci