110+ Paul Valery Quotes (Creative, Philosophical And Lyrical)

Paul Valery was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. He was born in 1871 in Sète, France, and died in 1945. He is known for his works in French literature, and his influence on the development of modern poetry.

Top 10 Paul Valery Quotes

1. The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
5. The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
6. Love is being stupid together.
7. The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
8. A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.
9. An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.
10. We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

Paul Valery Short Quotes

• A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
• Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
• If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.
• The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
• The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
• We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
• A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
• An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
• A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
• All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

Paul Valery Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Paul Valery

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

Politeness is organized indifference. — Paul Valery

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

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. — Paul Valery

Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease. — Paul Valery

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph. — Paul Valery

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing. — Paul Valery

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

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 Valery

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder. — Paul Valery

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 Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

Power without abuse loses its charm. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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

Sometimes I think and other times I am. — Paul Valery

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

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

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. — Paul Valery

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

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. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

At times I think and at times I am. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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! — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel. — Paul Valery

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing. — Paul Valery

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

We must always apologize for talking painting. — Paul Valery

What is simple is false and what is not is useless. — Paul Valery

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. — Paul Valery

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

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

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless. — 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

It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another. — Paul Valery

Conscience reigns but it does not govern. — Paul Valery

to live means to lack something at every moment — Paul Valery

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 Valery

Everything changes but the avant-garde. — Paul Valery

Poems are never finished - just abandoned — Paul Valery

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will. — Paul Valery

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

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

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

The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed? — Paul Valery

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

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

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

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

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

Whoever wants to accomplish great things must devote to a lot of profound thought to details. — Paul Valery

Science is a collection of successful recipes. — Paul Valery

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am . — Paul Valery

History is the science of what never happens twice. — Paul Valery

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

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

Cognition reigns but does not rule. — Paul Valery

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal. — Paul Valery

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences. — Paul Valery

Nothing beautiful can be summarized. — Paul Valery

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair. — Paul Valery

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

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

Stupidity is not my strong suit. — Paul Valery

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be. — Paul Valery

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

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

Life Lessons by Paul Valery

1. Paul Valery teaches us to be mindful of our actions and how they shape our lives, as he wrote "The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."
2. He also encourages us to embrace our creative side and to find beauty in the world around us, as he wrote "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
3. Lastly, Paul Valery reminds us to be humble and to accept our limitations, as he wrote "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations."