Paul Valery Quotes

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

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.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

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.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Love is being stupid together.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

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

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

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

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

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

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.

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

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

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.

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

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

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

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

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.

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 helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

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

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.

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

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

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

His heart is a desert island.... The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate him and guard him against the truth. He flatters himself that he is entirely alone there.... Patience, dear lady. Perhaps, one day, he will discover some footprint on the sand.... What holy and happy terror, what salutary fright, once he recognizes in that pure sign of grace that his island is mysteriously inhabited!

To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Politeness is organized indifference.