Quotes about Paul Valéry

6 Sourced Quotes

If I had to preach a sermon on the family I would take for my text this phrase of Paul Valery's: In every family there is concealed a specific interior boredom which causes its members to escape and live their own lives. There is also in every family an ancient and powerful force which manifests itself when the group is gathered in the dining-room for its evening meal, when its members feel free to be completely themselves.

Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes. They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply le bonheur.

Herbert Marcuse

Paul Valéry has no hesitation in saying that the greatest evils today are elections and diplomas.

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

And one of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead, to produce future as Paul Valéry put it.

François Jacob

The journey of Saint-Exupéry is back towards his starting point. We cherish secure happiness, the happiness of childhood, but discover that we must leave childhood whether we want to do so or not. We are therefore launched into Valéry's 'ère successive', where salvation is to be found in action.