Paul Valéry quotes - page 2

Paul Valéry was a renowned French poet, essayist, and philosopher, celebrated for his introspective and intellectual writings. His works explored themes such as consciousness, creativity, and the mind, often delving into the nature of art and thought. He influenced generations of writers and thinkers with his refined language and analytical approach. Here are 120 of his quotes:

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.

Paul Valéry

It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary-and not only necessary but urgent-to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valéry

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!

Paul Valéry

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

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.

Paul Valéry

Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.

Paul Valéry

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 Valéry

A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.

Paul Valéry

Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.

Paul Valéry

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.

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

Stupidity is not my strong point.

Paul Valéry

This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or.. inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life - which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him. Teste was conceived - in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years - at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self. I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.

Paul Valéry

Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All.

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

Paul Valéry

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.

Paul Valéry