Paul Valéry: Mind

Paul Valéry was French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on mind.

Paul Valéry: 178 quotes130 likes

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

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

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“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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

Tel Quel (1943)

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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