Paul Valéry cytaty

strona 2

„Przeszkody to znaki niejasne, przed którymi jedni wpadają w rozpacz, drudzy zaś rozumieją, że jest coś do zrobienia, ale są i tacy, którzy tych znaków nawet nie widzą.”

„Gdy nie potrafi się atakować myśli, atakujemy jego autora.”

„Człowiek poważny nie jest pomysłowy. Człowiek pomysłowy nigdy nie jest poważny.”

„Ci, co lękają się żartu, niezbyt ufają we własne siły. To Herkulesy, którzy boją się łaskotek.”

„Myśli i uczucia zupełnie nagie są bezbronne jak nadzy ludzie. Trzeba je więc w coś ubrać.”

„Wadą siły jest nadmierna wiara tylko w siłę.”

„Wybierz sobie żonę, która nie wierzy w to, co widzi.”

„Jeśli dwie osoby rozstają się w gniewie, to znaczy, że łączyły je zbyt bliskie stosunki.”

„Miłość potęguje witalność, na tym polega jej prawdziwa wartość.”

„Nauka jest zbiorem wypróbowanych przepisów.”

„Każda myśl to wyjątek ogólnego prawa, jakim jest niemyślenie.”

„Tradycja i postęp – to dwaj wielcy wrogowie ludzkości.”

„My, cywilizacje, wiemy już teraz, że jesteśmy śmiertelne.”

„Bóg stworzył wszystko z niczego i to nic niekiedy widać.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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?”

“We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.”

“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!”

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

“What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.”

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

“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.”

“Man can act only because he can ignore.”

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

“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."”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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