That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
—Paul Valery
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Disorder
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
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Scientists, Science
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
—Paul Valery
Topics: One liners, Photography
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
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
A businessman is a hybrid between a dancer and a calculator.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Business
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Poetry, Poets
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Future, Time
Love is being stupid together.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Love
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
—Paul Valery
Every beginning is a consequence. Every beginning ends something.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Beginnings, Change, Beginning
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Justice, Attitude, Judgement
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
It would be impossible to “love” anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Love
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
Ignorance wavers between extreme audacity and extreme shyness.
—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
The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Mind
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This … is a precious gift.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Ignorance
Sometimes I think and other times I am.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Thinking
A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Sanity
History is the science of what never happens twice.
—Paul Valery
Topics: History
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Poetry
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
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
—Paul Valery
Topics: Ideas
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
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
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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