Paul Valéry Short Quotes

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The wind is rising... we must attempt to live.

Paul Valéry
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Valéry
The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

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

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

Paul Valéry
An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

Paul Valéry
A faultily observed fact is more treacherous than a faulty train of reasoning.

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

Paul Valéry
"Cleverness" is transmuted into "genius" when it takes the form of a simplification.

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

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

Paul Valéry
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

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

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

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
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
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