Paul Valéry Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

Paul Valéry
Everyman has his back to his death, like the talker leaning against the mantelpiece.

Paul Valéry
Space is an imaginary body, as time is fictive movement. When we say "in space" or "space is filled with" we are positing a body.

Paul Valéry
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."

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

Paul Valéry
God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.

Paul Valéry
For direct feeling, [erudition] substitutes theories, for the marvellous actuality an encyclopedic memory; and the immense museum is further saddled with a limitless library. Venus becomes a document.

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.

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.

Paul Valéry
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.

Paul Valéry
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
Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

Paul Valéry
Politics is the art of preventing people from minding their own business.

Paul Valéry
Nearly all the books I prize, and absolutely all that have been of any use to me, are books that don't make easy reading.

Paul Valéry
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Paul Valéry
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Paul Valéry
If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.

Paul Valéry
Thought is bisexual; it both inseminates and conceives itself.

Paul Valéry
Without religions the sciences would never have existed. For the human brain would not have trained itself to range beyond the immediate, ever — present "facts" of appearance which, for it, constitute reality.

Paul Valéry
Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

Paul Valéry
If a bird could say exactly what he sings, why he sings it, and what, within himself, is singing, he would not sing.

Paul Valéry
A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.

Paul Valéry
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.

Paul Valéry
To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

Paul Valéry
Small unexplained facts always contain grounds for upsetting all explanations of "big" facts.

Paul Valéry