Paul Valery

We must always apologize for talking painting.

— Paul Valery

History is the science of what never happens twice.

— Paul Valery

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

— Paul Valery

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

— Paul Valery

To penetrate one's being, one must go armed to the teeth.

— Paul Valery

“Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce.”

— Paul Valéry

“Sentimentul de a fi tot si evidenta de a nu fi nimic.”

— Paul Valéry

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

— Paul Valery

“The best way to make your own dreams come true is to wake up”

— Paul Valéry

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

— Paul Valery

Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.

— Paul Valery

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

— Paul Valery

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

— Paul Valery

“Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.”

— Paul Valéry

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”

— Paul Valery

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

— Paul Valery

Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must…

— Paul Valery

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that…

— Paul Valery

“You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which…

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valery

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the…

— Paul Valery

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a…

— Paul Valery

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre…

— Paul Valery

The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value,…

— Paul Valery

There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes…

— Paul Valery

“Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in…

— Paul Valéry

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it…

— Paul Valery

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in…

— Paul Valery

“For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends…

— Paul Valéry

His heart is a desert island… The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate…

— Paul Valery

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a…

— Paul Valery

“I think of the presence and of the habits of mortals in this so fluid stream, and reflect that I was among…

— Paul Valéry

“I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and…

— Paul Valery

“Ingres’ pencil pursues ideal grace to the point of monstrosity: the spine never long and supple enough, the neck flexible enough, the…

— Paul Valéry

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by…

— Paul Valery

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate…

— Paul Valéry

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power…

— Paul Valéry

“I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who…

— Paul Valery

“...the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.”

— Paul Valéry

[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

— Paul Valery