Paul Valéry Quotes

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.

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

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

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.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.

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

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

Peace is a virtual mute sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.

Une philosophie doit etre portative.

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

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

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

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

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

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.