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
Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

Paul Valéry
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Valéry
A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Thought is bisexual; it both inseminates and conceives itself.

Paul Valéry
Much confusion in science, and in everything else, arises from this, that men who have no capacity for thought will presume to theorise, because they cannot see that mere stores of knowledge, however vast, in themselves give no capacity for thinking.

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
There is a value called mind as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can follow it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world's general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.

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

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
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