Paul Valery quotes:

Love is being stupid together.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

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.

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.

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

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

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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

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

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

Power without abuse loses its charm.

The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted. There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.

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

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

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

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate a certain way of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of 'contemporary'. There are moments and places in history to which 'we moderns' could return without too greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous... creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassailable.

This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind."

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Politeness is organized indifference.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

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

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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

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

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

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.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world order and disorder

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

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

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

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

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

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

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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

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.

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.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones.

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.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

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

At times I think and at times I am.

Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.

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

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

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.

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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

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

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

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

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

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.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

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.

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

Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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!...

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.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

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

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

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

If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

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.

Love is acting stupid together.

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

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

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

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

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

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation.