Paul Valery quotes

Paul Valéry was a prominent French poet, philosopher, and essayist known for his profound insights. With a career spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Valéry's immense literary contribution and intellectual brilliance earned him recognition worldwide. His poems exemplify rich imagery, subtle emotions, and intricate wordplay. Valéry's philosophical works explore the nature of knowledge, art, and the mind, delving into the complexities of human existence. This SEO-friendly biography showcases the life and work of Paul Valéry, a true literary genius.

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

- Paul Valery

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

- 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 each other.

- Paul Valery

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

- Paul Valery

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

- Paul Valery

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am.

- Paul Valery

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

- Paul Valery

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

- Paul Valery

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

- Paul Valery

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

- Paul Valery

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

- Paul Valery

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.

- Paul Valery

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

- Paul Valery

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

- Paul Valery

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

- Paul Valery

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

- Paul Valery

There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

- Paul Valery

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

- Paul Valery

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

- Paul Valery

Love is being stupid together.

- Paul Valery

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

- Paul Valery

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

- Paul Valery

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

- Paul Valery

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

- Paul Valery

Politeness is organized indifference.

- Paul Valery

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

- Paul Valery

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

- Paul Valery

At times I think and at times I am.

- Paul Valery

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

- Paul Valery

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

- Paul Valery