“To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.” — Paul Valéry Copy Share Image
A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished a word that for them has no sense but abandoned; and… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
“O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is… — Paul Valéry Copy Share Image
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
“I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who did not… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
“Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.” — Paul Valéry Copy Share Image
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
