Quotes and Quotations

Memorable Quotes and quotations from Paul Valery

Paul Valery French critic & poet (1871 - 1945)


Paul Valery -
- Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.

Paul Valery - Tel Quel 2 (1943)
- Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery -
- The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Paul Valery - 1895
- 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.

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.

Paul Valery -
- Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery -
- Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Paul Valery -
- God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

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

Paul Valery -
- Love is being stupid together.

Paul Valery -
- The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

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.

Paul Valery -
- Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

Paul Valery -
- The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Paul Valery -
- A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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

Paul Valery -
- A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.

Paul Valery -
- A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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.

Paul Valery -
- God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.