Paul Valéry Quotes

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.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Love is being stupid together.

Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume Maint diamant d'imperceptible écume, Et quelle paix semble se concevoir! Quand sur l'abîme un soleil se repose, Ouvrages purs d'une éternelle cause, Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.