Paul Valery

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.