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. 16 |
| • | The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. 14 |
| • | Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business. 12 |
| • | Optimists do not write well. 9 |
| • | The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. 9 |
| • | That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false. 9 |
| • | Ego is awful. The ego of other people, of course. 8 |
| • | A leader is someone who needs other people. 8 |
| • | Fascism begins with the thought that everybody else is an idiot. 8 |
| • | If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish. 8 |
| • | A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key. 7 |
| • | Love is being stupid together. 7 |
| • | Nothing ages faster than the modern. 6 |
| • | Always, start again. Toujours recommancer. 6 |
| • | A politician is a hybrid of a dancer and an accountant. 6 |
| • | Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions. 6 |
| • | God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. 6 |
| • | Politeness is organized indifference. 6 |
| • | A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone. 5 |
| • | Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable. 5 |
| • | Stupidity is not my strong point. 5 |
| • | Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am. 5 |
| • | Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. 5 |
| • | Conscience reigns but it does not govern. 4 |
| • | The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness. 4 |
| • | Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences. 4 |
| • | Nothing beautiful can be summarized. 4 |
| • | Science is a collection of successful recipes. 4 |
| • | Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance. 4 |
| • | Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language. 4 |
| • | The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds. 4 |
| • | To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth. 4 |
| • | Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All. 4 |
| • | A work of art is never finished; it is only abandoned. 4 |
| • | A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning. 3 |
| • | What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully. 3 |
| • | Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. 3 |
| • | Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing. 3 |
| • | All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable. 3 |
| • | Power without abuse loses its charm. 3 |
| • | Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. 3 |