Quotes by
Paul Valery |
1871-1945 , French poet
French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. His greatest poem is considered La Jeune Parque (1917; “The Young Fate”), which was followed by Album de vers anciens 1890–1900 (1920) and Charmes ou poèmes (1922), containing the poem “The Graveyard by the Sea”.
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Quotations
| • | God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely. 15 |
| • | The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. 13 |
| • | Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business. 11 |
| • | The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. 8 |
| • | Optimists do not write well. 8 |
| • | If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish. 7 |
| • | That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false. 7 |
| • | Fascism begins with the thought that everybody else is an idiot. 7 |
| • | A leader is someone who needs other people. 7 |
| • | Ego is awful. The ego of other people, of course. 7 |
| • | Love is being stupid together. 6 |
| • | A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key. 6 |
| • | Politeness is organized indifference. 5 |
| • | God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. 5 |
| • | Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions. 5 |
| • | A politician is a hybrid of a dancer and an accountant. 5 |
| • | Always, start again. Toujours recommancer. 5 |
| • | Nothing ages faster than the modern. 5 |
| • | Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. 4 |
| • | Stupidity is not my strong point. 4 |
| • | Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable. 4 |
| • | A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone. 4 |
| • | A work of art is never finished; it is only abandoned. 3 |
| • | Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All. 3 |
| • | Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am. 3 |
| • | To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth. 3 |
| • | The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds. 3 |
| • | Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language. 3 |
| • | Science is a collection of successful recipes. 3 |
| • | Nothing beautiful can be summarized. 3 |
| • | Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences. 3 |
| • | The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness. 3 |
| • | Conscience reigns but it does not govern. 3 |
| • | Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. 2 |
| • | Power without abuse loses its charm. 2 |
| • | Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance. 2 |
| • | All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable. 2 |
| • | Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing. 2 |
| • | Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. 2 |
| • | What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully. 2 |
| • | A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning. 2 |