Paul Valéry Quotes

You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

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!

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.

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

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée O récompense après une pensée Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!

This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by, Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly. Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame — That sea forever starting and re-starting. When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding Are the long vistas of celestial calm!

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

You have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings .... You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

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

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

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

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