Paul Valéry Quotes (89 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Monsieur Teste

Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry: 89 quotes 130 likes

Famous Paul Valéry Quotes

“to live means to lack something at every moment”

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

Unsourced

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

Paul Valéry

La guerre, c'est un massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent, mais ne se massacrent pas.
Bizarre, issues 24-31 (1962), p. 102
This apocryphal quote from Paul Valéry is never precisely sourced: neither on the internet nor in the works we have consulted. See: https://www.guichetdusavoir.org/question/voir/52650

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”

Paul Valéry

Unsourced

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry Quotes about time

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

“This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or.. inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.
Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self.
I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.”

Paul Valéry book Monsieur Teste

Preface
Monsieur Teste (1919)

“Man discerns three great things in the All: he finds there his body, he finds there his soul—and then there is the rest of the world. Between these things there is an unceasing commerce, and sometimes even a confusion arises; but always after a certain time has elapsed, these three things come to be clearly distinguished from one another.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 128
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

“What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty —
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.”

Paul Valéry

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.
As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

“Now present here, the future takes its time.
The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
To some ineffably rarefied solution...
Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.”

Paul Valéry

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.
As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 172

Paul Valéry: Trending quotes

“But what, Phaedrus, is the contrary of a dream if not some other dream?… A dream of vigilance and tension dreamt by Reason herself!—And what would such a Reason dream?—If a Reason were to dream—a Reason hard, erect, eyes armed, mouth closed, as though mistress of her lips—would not the dream she dreamt be what we see now—this world of exact forces and studied illusions?—A dream, a dream, but a dream interpenetrated with symmetries, all order, acts and sequences!”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 35
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

World , Dreams , Study

“Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Unsourced

“We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.”

Paul Valéry

Original: (fr) On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayé d’inventer.
Source: Unsourced

Paul Valéry Quotes

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

God , Feeling , Solitude

“The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!”

Paul Valéry

As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Variant translations:
The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)
Context: The wind is rising!... We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.

“Love is being stupid together.”

Paul Valéry

Love , Stupidity

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

Paul Valéry

People , Books , Animals , Weather

“Sometime I think; and sometime I am.”

Paul Valéry

Thinking

“To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.”

Paul Valéry

“To construct oneself, to know oneself—are these two distinct acts or not?”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 81
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

“The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.”

Paul Valéry

Moralités (1932)
Context: Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

Art , Science

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895)
Context: 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.

Life , Art , Learning

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Originally delivered as a lecture (late 1927); Pure Poetry: Notes for a Lecture The Creative Vision (1960)
Context: 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.

Error

“Stupidity is not my strong point.”

Paul Valéry book Monsieur Teste

Variant translations:
Stupidity is not my strong suit.
Monsieur Teste (1919)
Context: Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many persons; I have visited several countries; I have taken part in various enterprises without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have had women. I can now recall a few hundred faces, two or three great spectacles, and the substance of perhaps twenty books. I have not retained the best nor the worst of these things: what could stay with me did.

Stupidity , Strong

“Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.”

Paul Valéry

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

Paul Valéry

History

“The deeper education consists in unlearning one's first education.”

Paul Valéry

Source: An Anthology

Education

“Cognition reigns but does not rule.”

Paul Valéry

“Now, of all acts the most complete is that of constructing. A work demands love, meditation, obedience to your finest thought, the invention of laws by your soul, and many other things that it draws miraculously from your own self, which did not suspect that it possessed them. This work proceeds from the most intimate center of your existence, and yet it is distinct from yourself.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 145
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Love , Law , Soul , Drawing

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

Paul Valéry

Letter to writer André Gide, as quoted in The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1978) by Julian Symons, Pt. 1, Epilogue

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Sense

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Writing at the Yalu River (1895) quoted in Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (1990) by Julius Thomas Fraser, Part 2, Images in Heaven and on the Earth, Ch. IV, The Roots of Time in the Physical World. Sect. 3 The Living Symmetries of Physics
Context: 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.

Feeling , Intelligence , Sense , Patience

“Politeness is organized indifference.”

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

Indifference

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

Paul Valéry

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

God

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”

Paul Valéry

Unsourced

Forgetting

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Source: The Art of Poetry

Error , Nature , Happiness

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Beauty

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Unsourced

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

Paul Valéry

Bird , Light

“All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
Am I. Divine impatience also dies.”

Paul Valéry

Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse,
La sainte impatience meurt aussi!
As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

“I cannot think that there exists more than one Sovereign Good.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 81
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Thinking

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

Paul Valéry

Moralités (1932)

Literature , Science , Success

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

Paul Valéry

Phaedrus, p. 47
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Love , Soul , Lovers

“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!”

Paul Valéry

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!
Le Cimetière Marin · Online original and translation as "The Graveyard By The Sea" by C. Day Lewis http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/%7Ecooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html
Variant translations:
The sea, the ever renewing sea!
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

Sea

“The very object of an 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 of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.”

Paul Valéry

Remarks on Poetry in The Art of Poetry (1958)

Art , Nature , Effort

“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?”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 130. Ellipsis in original.
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

God , Search , Nature , Effort

“We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.”

Paul Valéry

La Crise de l'Esprit (1919)

“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!”

Paul Valéry

Eryximachus, p. 52
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Error , Business , Nature , Thinking

“An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.”

Paul Valéry

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

Stupidity , Intelligence

“What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.”

Paul Valéry

Eupalinos quoted by Phaedrus, p. 86
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Beauty

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

Paul Valéry

Eryximachus, p. 27
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Dreams , Soul

“Man can act only because he can ignore.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 124
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

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

Paul Valéry

Lucretius, p. 171
Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)

“Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."”

Paul Valéry

Littérature (1930)

Truth , Literature

“A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to … emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 55

Birth , Appearance , Help

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

Paul Valéry

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

Painting

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

People , Art , Business

“There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 161

World

“The “determinist” swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression “know everything” means nothing.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 42

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

Falseness

“What is there more mysterious than clarity?… What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over hours and over men?”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 107. Ellipsis in original.
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Men , Way , Light

“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.”

Paul Valéry

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.
As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

Beauty , Home , Change , Dead

“Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 167-168

Age , Art , Idea , Freedom