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
A work of art/a poem is never really finished, it is merely abandoned.
—Paul Valery
A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Sanity
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Balance
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.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Thought
Love is being stupid together.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Love
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
Topics: Thoughts
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Every beginning is a consequence. Every beginning ends something.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Beginning, Beginnings, Change
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Disorder
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Self Respect
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
Topics: Scientists, Science
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Scientists, Science
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Anxiety, Worry
Ignorance wavers between extreme audacity and extreme shyness.
—Paul Valery
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Truth
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Ideas
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
—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
Topics: Work
A businessman is a hybrid between a dancer and a calculator.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Business
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Dreams
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Belief
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Creativity
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 the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Mistakes
Sometimes I think and other times I am.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Thinking
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
—Paul Valery
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.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Knowledge
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This … is a precious gift.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Ignorance
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well
—Paul Valery
Topics: Poetry
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stephane Mallarme French Poet
- Gaston Bachelard French Philosopher
- Gerard de Nerval French Poet, Writer
- Edgar Quinet French Intellectual
- Arthur Rimbaud French Poet
- Remy de Gourmont French Poet, Writer
- Charles Baudelaire French Poet
- Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
- Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
- Michel de Montaigne French Essayist
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