Home > Author > Paul Valéry
1 " Une philosophie doit etre portative. "
― Paul Valéry , Cahiers = Notebooks
2 " God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly "
― Paul Valéry
3 " God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. "
4 " 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 Valéry , The Art of Poetry
5 " Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph. "
6 " Poems are never finished - just abandoned "
7 " 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. "
8 " What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully. "
9 " Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern. "
10 " The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. "
11 " Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. "
12 " Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance. "
13 " For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know. "
― Paul Valéry , Selected Writings
14 " The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. "
15 " Life blackens at the contact of truth. "
16 " What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. "
17 " Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker. "
18 " 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. "
19 " Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. "
20 " 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. "
