Paul Valéry Quotes (89 quotes, page 2)

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

Paul Valéry

History and Politics http://books.google.com/books?id=7I82AAAAIAAJ&q="If+the+state+is+strong+it+crushes+us+If+it+is+weak+we+perish" as translated by D. Folliot and J. Mathews (1971)

Strong

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

Paul Valéry

Lucretius, p. 163
Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)

Love , Flowers

“The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, … since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.
There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 166

World

“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.”

Paul Valéry

Le mal de prendre une hypallage pour une découverte, une métaphore pour une démonstration, un vomissement de mots pour un torrent de connaissances capitales, et soi-même pour un oracle, ce mal naît avec nous.
Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895)

Truth , Spring

“In the Beginning was the Fable.”

Paul Valéry

Tityrus, p. 169, quoting "a philosopher whose name I have forgotten". The philosopher is Valéry himself, who used this phrase at the end of his essay on Poe's Eureka, and elsewhere (Dialogues, textual note on p. 195).
Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)

“Most people in reasoning, dear Phaedrus, use notions that not only are "ready-made," but have actually been made by nobody. No one is responsible for them, and so they serve everyone badly.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 137
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

People

“Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 141
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

“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.”

Paul Valéry

"Recollection", Collected Works, vol. 1 (1972), as translated by David Paul
Variant translations:
A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it — i.e. gives it to the public.
As attributed in Susan Ratcliffe, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2011), p. 385.
A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.
Widely quoted, this is a paraphrase of Valéry by W. H. Auden in 1965. See W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (2007), ed. Edward Mendelson, "Author's Forewords", p. xxx.
An artist never finishes a work, he merely abandons it.
A paraphrase by Aaron Copland in the essay "Creativity in America," published in Copland on Music (1944), p. 53
In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished — a word that for them has no sense — but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

Death

“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty. But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, pp. 128–9
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

World , Beauty , Soul , Communication

“Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious.
But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 58

Men

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

People , Art , Parting

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

Idea

“Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!”

Paul Valéry

Eryximachus, p. 46
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Soul , Understanding

“It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary—and not only necessary but urgent—to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.”

Paul Valéry

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 156

Fate , Time

“The greatest liberty is born of the greatest rigor.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 131
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

“But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, pp. 147–8
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Women , Men , Secret , Mountain

“And do not humans strive in a thousand ways to fill or to break the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that affright them?”

Paul Valéry

Socrates, p. 125
Valéry alludes to a famous pensée of Blaise Pascal: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces affrights me.' (Pensées, no. 201).
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Way , Silence

“You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?”

Paul Valéry

Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Law , Way , Idea

“Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?”

Paul Valéry

Lucretius, p. 173
Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)

“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty.”

Paul Valéry

But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.
Socrates, pp. 128–9
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Beauty , Thinking , Soul

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

Paul Valéry

Source: Unsourced