Paul Valery Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politeness is organized indifference.

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

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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

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

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

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

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

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.

We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

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.

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

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

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