Paul Valery

“Entrer chez les gens pour déconcerter leurs idées, leur faire la surprise d'être surpris de ce qu'ils font, de ce qu'ils pensent, et qu'ils n'ont jamais conçu différent, c'est, au moyen de l'ingénuité feinte ou réelle, donner à ressentir toute la relativité d'une civilisation, d'une confiance habituelle dans l'ordre établi.”

“Ce qui n'est pas ineffable n'a aucune importance.”

“What is more important than the meal? Doesn’t the least observant man-about-town look upon the implementation and ritual progress of a meal as a liturgical prescription? Isn’t all of civilization apparent in these careful preparations, which consecrate the spirit’s triumph over a raging appetite?”

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Politeness is organized indifference.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“History is the science of what never happens twice.”

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

“Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce.”

“To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art.”

“I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.”

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

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. ”

“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”

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

“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”

“I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and through a determined analysis of definite and previously prescribed conditions, whatever its value might be once it had been produced, did not leave the mind of its creator without having modified him, and forced him to recognize and in some way reorganize himself. I said to myself that it was not the accomplished work, and its appearance and effect in the world, that can fulfill and edify us; but only the way in which we have done it.”

“I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who did not perceive what we perceived, were in a quite legitimate position. Their opinion was quite in order. One must not be afraid to say that the kingdom of letters is only a province of the vast empire of entertainment. One picks up a book, one puts it aside; and even when one cannot put it down one very well understands that this interest is related to the facility of pleasure. That is to say that every effort of a creator of beauty or of fantasy should be bent, by the very essence of his work, on contriving for the public pleasure which demands no effort, or almost none. It is through the public that he should deduce what touches, moves, soothes, animates or enchants the public.There are however several publics; amongst whom it is not impossible to find some people who do not conceive of pleasure without pain, who do not like to enjoy themselves without paying, and who are not happy if their happiness is not in some part their own contrivance through which they wish to realize what it costs them. ”

“Love is being stupid together.”

“At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.”

“Our judgements judge us; and nothing reveals us [or] exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”

“Power without abuse loses its charm.”

“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.”

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

“to live means to lack something at every moment”

“Patience, patience.Patience dans l'azurchaque atome de silenceest la chance d'un fruit mûr !”

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”