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Paul Valéry
65 quotes
“The being filled with wonder is lovely, like a flower.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Beginning was the Fable.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What's loftiest in the mind can only live through growth.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pascal lui-même n'a pas manqué de s'y tromper, qui traita de cet art avec superbe, et le réduisait à la vanité de poursuivre laborieusement la ressemblance de choses dont la vue d'elles-mêmes est sans intérêt, ce qui prouve qu'il ne savait pas regarder, c'est-à-dire oublier les noms des choses que l'on voit.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Machine translation from Degas Danse Dessin, 1965 edition, page 246
“If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: History and Politics as translated by D. Folliot and J. Mathews (1971)
“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.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Recollection", Collected Works, vol. 1 (1972), as translated by David Paul
“Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to writer André Gide, as quoted in The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1978) by Julian Symons, Pt. 1, Epilogue
“Vous n’avez ni la patience qui tisse les longues vies, ni le sentiment de l’irrégularité, ni le sens de la place la plus exquise d’une chose, … « L’intelligence, pour vous, n’est pas une chose comme les autres. […] vous l’adorez comme une bête prépondérante. […] Un particulier qu’elle enivre, compare sa pensée aux décisions des lois, aux faits eux-mêmes, nés de la foule et de la durée : il confond le rapide changement de son cœur avec la variation imperceptible des formes réelles et des Êtres durables. … C’est par cette loi que l’intelligence méprise les lois... et vous encouragez sa violence ! Vous en êtes fous jusqu’au moment de la peur. Car vos idées sont terribles et vos cœurs faibles. Vos pitiés, vos cruautés sont absurdes, sans calme, comme irrésistibles. Enfin, vous craignez le sang, de plus en plus. Vous craignez le sang et le temps.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Writing at the Yalu River (1895) quoted in Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (1990) by Julius Thomas Fraser, Part 2, Images in Heaven and on the Earth, Ch. IV, The Roots of Time i…
“For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Originally delivered as a lecture (late 1927); Pure Poetry: Notes for a Lecture The Creative Vision (1960)
“This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or . . inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him. Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self. I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty. But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment. And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. … The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. ... In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. ... The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) said by 1945 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source