Paul Valéry Quotes

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

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.

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

Pascal himself did not fail to make a mistake, who treated this art superbly, and reduced it to the vanity of laboriously pursuing the resemblance of things whose sight of themselves is of no interest, which proves that he did not know how to look, that is to say, how to forget the names of the things we see.

Pascal lui-même n'a pas manqué de s'y tromper, qui traita de cet art avec superbe, et le réduisait à la vanité de poursuivre laborieusement la ressemblance de choses dont la vue d'elles-mêmes est sans intérêt, ce qui prouve qu'il ne savait pas regarder, c'est-à-dire oublier les noms des choses que l'on voit.

Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?

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

In the Beginning was the Fable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.