Paul Valéry: Thing

Paul Valéry was French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on thing.
Paul Valéry: 178   quotes 130   likes

“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

“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

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

Paul Valéry

Unsourced

Forgetting

“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)

“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)

World , Soul , Time

“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

“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

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

Paul Valéry

Tel Quel (1943)

Idea

“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