Paul Valéry Quotes

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the pa...

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

Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This ... is a precious ...

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by w...

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but...

Peace is a virtual mute sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the at...

At times I think and at times I am.

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

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

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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

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

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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

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

To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.

Love is being stupid together.

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

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

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

Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.

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

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

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

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is ...

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we th...

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

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

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

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliv...

Une philosophie doit etre portative.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promi...

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe t...

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for ...