Paul Valéry - Mind Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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

Paul Valéry
I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.

Paul Valéry
An attitude of permanent indignation signfies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more and more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous anger to the next.

Paul Valéry
It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary—and not only necessary but urgent—to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.

Paul Valéry
A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to … emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.

Paul Valéry
Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.

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
A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.

Paul Valéry