Paul Valéry quotes - page 4

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)
And do not humans strive in a thousand ways to fill or to break the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that affright them? View quote
Paul Valéry
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? View quote
Paul Valéry
Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order? View quote
Paul Valéry
My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more. View quote
Paul Valéry
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows. View quote
Paul Valéry
A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas. View quote
Paul Valéry
We are enriched by our reciprocate differences. View quote
Paul Valéry
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh. View quote
Paul Valéry
History is the science of things which are not repeated. View quote
Paul Valéry
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts. (Paul Valéry)
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others. View quote
Paul Valéry
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false. View quote
Paul Valéry
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well. View quote
Paul Valéry
Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science. View quote
Paul Valéry
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. View quote
Paul Valéry
Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change! After such arrogance, after so much strange Idleness - strange, yet full of potency - I am all open to these shining spaces; Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes, Ghosting along - a ghost subduing me. View quote
Paul Valéry
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. View quote
Paul Valéry
Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to. View quote
Paul Valéry
Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever. View quote
Paul Valéry
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. (Paul Valéry)
Everything changes but the avant-garde. View quote
Paul Valéry
A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it-that is to say, gives it to the public. View quote
Paul Valéry
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another. View quote
Paul Valéry
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery. View quote
Paul Valéry