Paul Valéry Quotes

To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.
Paul Valéry
Peace is a virtual mute sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.
Paul Valéry
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.
Paul Valéry
Peace is a virtual mute sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.
Paul Valéry
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.
Paul Valéry
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This ... is a precious gift.
Paul Valéry
Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
Paul Valéry
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valéry
An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.
Paul Valéry
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.
Paul Valéry
Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.
Paul Valéry
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valéry
Life blackens at the contact of truth.
Paul Valéry
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valéry
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.
Paul Valéry
Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valéry
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.
Paul Valéry
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valéry
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
Paul Valéry
Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.
Paul Valéry
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valéry
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 Valéry
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valéry
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Paul Valéry
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.
Paul Valéry
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valéry
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly
Paul Valéry
Une philosophie doit etre portative.
Paul Valéry