Top 159 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Valery - Page 3

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.

To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.

Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

Stupidity is not my strong suit.

Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.

The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

Sometimes I think and other times I am.

Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.

Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This is a precious gift.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

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

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

Everything changes but the avant-garde.