Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

— Paul Valery

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 Valery

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

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

Love is being stupid together.

— Paul Valery

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.

— Paul Valery

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

— Paul Valery

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

— Paul Valery

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

— Paul Valery

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

The very object of 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 or hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

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 Valery

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

But what, Phaedrus, is the contrary of a dream if not some other dream?… A dream of vigilance and tension dreamt by Reason herself!—And what would such a Reason dream?—If a Reason were to dream—a Reason hard, erect, eyes armed, mouth closed, as though mistress of her lips—would not the dream she dreamt be what we see now—this world of exact forces and studied illusions?—A dream, a dream, but a dream interpenetrated with symmetries, all order, acts and sequences!

— Paul Valery

You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?

— Paul Valery

Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!

— Paul Valery

[T]he soul of love is the invincible difference of lovers, while its subtle matter is the identity of their desires.

— Paul Valery

What are mortals for?—Their business is to know. Know? And what is to know?—It is assuredly: not to be what one is.—And so here are humans raving and thinking, introducing into nature the principle of unlimited error, and myriads of marvels!

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

I cannot think that there exists more than one Sovereign Good.

— Paul Valery

To construct oneself, to know oneself—are these two distinct acts or not?

— Paul Valery

What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.

— Paul Valery

What is there more mysterious than clarity?… What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over hours and over men?

— Paul Valery

Man can act only because he can ignore.

— Paul Valery

And do not humans strive in a thousand ways to fill or to break the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that affright them?

— Paul Valery

Man discerns three great things in the All: he finds there his body, he finds there his soul—and then there is the rest of the world. Between these things there is an unceasing commerce, and sometimes even a confusion arises; but always after a certain time has elapsed, these three things come to be clearly distinguished from one another.

— Paul Valery

Nay, who knows, Phaedrus, if the efforts of humans in their search for God, the observances, the prayers they essay, their obstinate will to discover the most efficacious… who knows if mortals will not finally discover a certitude—or an incertitude—stable and in exact conformity with their nature, if not with the very nature of God?

— Paul Valery

The greatest liberty is born of the greatest rigor.

— Paul Valery

Most people in reasoning, dear Phaedrus, use notions that not only are "ready-made," but have actually been made by nobody. No one is responsible for them, and so they serve everyone badly.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

Now, of all acts the most complete is that of constructing. A work demands love, meditation, obedience to your finest thought, the invention of laws by your soul, and many other things that it draws miraculously from your own self, which did not suspect that it possessed them. This work proceeds from the most intimate center of your existence, and yet it is distinct from yourself.

— Paul Valery

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 Valery

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 Valery

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 Valery

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 Valery

There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.

— Paul Valery

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 Valery

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 Valery

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

— Paul Valery

God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

Politeness is organized indifference.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

The being filled with wonder is lovely, like a flower.

— Paul Valery

In the Beginning was the Fable.

— Paul Valery

What's loftiest in the mind can only live through growth.

— Paul Valery

Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

— Paul Valery

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

— Paul Valery

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery

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

— Paul Valery