Paul Valéry: Trending quotes

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Paul Valéry: 178 quotes130 likes

“Man can act only because he can ignore.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.”

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

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

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

“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!”

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

“We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.”

La Crise de l'Esprit (1919)

“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?”

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

“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.”

Remarks on Poetry in The Art of Poetry (1958)

“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!”

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,<br>Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;<br>Midi le juste y compose de feux<br>La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée<br>O récompense après une pensée<br>Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux! <br class="br">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 <br class="br">Variant translations: <br class="br">The sea, the ever renewing sea! <br class="br">Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

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

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

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

Moralités (1932)

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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)

“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.”

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

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

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

Source: Unsourced

“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.”