Paul Valery Quotes - Page 6

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

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

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.

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

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.

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

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

To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

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

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.

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

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.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

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

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

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

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

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.

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.

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