Paul Valéry Quotes

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

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.

Une philosophie doit etre portative.

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

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

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

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

Les livres ont les mêmes ennemis que l'homme : le feu, l'humide, les bêtes, le temps, et leur propre contenu.

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

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

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.