Paul Valery (1871-1945)

Quotes

• ...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

• It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.

• 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.

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

• God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

• The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

• A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

• Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.

• A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

• God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

• A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.

• Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

• 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.

• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

• Love is being stupid together.

• What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

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

• Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.