Valery, Paul quotes
1871-1945 French Poet EssayistSerious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Valery, Paul
Creativity
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Valery, Paul
Future
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.
Valery, Paul
Self-sabotage
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Valery, Paul
Justice
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Valery, Paul
Poetry and Poets
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Valery, Paul
Science and Scientists
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.
Valery, Paul
Science and Scientists
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Valery, Paul
Thoughts and Thinking
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Valery, Paul
Truth
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh.
Valery, Paul
Anxiety
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Valery, Paul
Belief
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.
Valery, Paul
Work