Famous Paul Valéry Quotations

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"Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science."
by Paul Valery
"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."
by Paul Valery
"Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh."
by Paul Valery
"...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."
by Paul Valery
"A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator."
by Paul Valery
"A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts."
by Paul Valery
"A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key."
by Paul Valery
"A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen."
by Paul Valery
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
by Paul Valery
"Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content."
by Paul Valery
"Books have the same enemies as people fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content."
by Paul Valery
"God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly."
by Paul Valery
"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."
by Paul Valery
"La politique est l'art d'empcher les gens de se mler de ce qui les regarde. (Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business."
by Paul Valery
"Love is being stupid together."
by Paul Valery
"Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery."
by Paul Valery
"Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to."
by Paul Valery
"Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them."
by Paul Valery
"Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business."
by Paul Valéry
"Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business."
by Paul Valery
"That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false."
by Paul Valery
"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."
by 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."
by Paul Valery
"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
by Paul Valery
"Two dangers constantly threaten the world order and disorder."
by Paul Valery
"What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves."
by Paul Valery
"Our judgments judge us; and nothing reveals us or exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows."
by Paul Ambroise Valery
"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 the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself."
by Paul Ambroise Valery
"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."
by Paul Ambroise Valery
"Lögnen och lättrogenheten parar sig och föder Den Allmänna Opinionen."
by Paul Valéry
"If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh."
by Paul Ambroise Valery


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