Quotes from Paul Valery

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

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

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

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.

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

Cognition reigns but does not rule.

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

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

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

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.

What soul would hesitate to turn the universe upside down in order to be a little more itself?

the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

Taste is made of a thousand distastes

Stupidity is not my strong point.

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

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

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.

Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

The stranger's way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize , who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being & non-being — belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition.

La meilleure façon de réaliser ses rêves est de se réveiller.

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.

Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon -- and falsehood, which is her armor.

She is entirely in her closed eyes, and quite alone with her soul, in the bosom of the most intimate attention... She feels in herself that she is becoming some event.

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