Paul Valéry Quotes

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

All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.

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?

What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.

Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change! After such arrogance, after so much strange Idleness — strange, yet full of potency — I am all open to these shining spaces; Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes, Ghosting along — a ghost subduing me.

Man can act only because he can ignore.

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change! Après tant d'orgueil, après tant d'étrange Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir, Je m'abandonne à ce brillant espace, Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe Qui m'apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.

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.

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.

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.

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

Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre! L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre, La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs! Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies! Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux rejouies Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!

Ici venu, l'avenir est paresse. L'insecte net gratte la sécheresse; Tout est brûlé, défait, reçu dans l'air A je ne sais quelle sévère essence . . . La vie est vaste, étant ivre d'absence, Et l'amertume est douce, et l'esprit clair.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.