Paul Valery Quotes - Page 3

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

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

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?

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

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

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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

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.

to live means to lack something at every moment

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

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

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.

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.

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.

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

Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.

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.

What is simple is false and what is not is useless.

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.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

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

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