Quotes from Paul Valery

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

At times I think and at times I am.

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

Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

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

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.

Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.

Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.

Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.

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

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

If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.

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

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

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

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

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

It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

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

What is simple is false and what is not is useless.

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.