Paul Valery
Paul Valery
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valérywas a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 October 1871
CountryFrance
truth honesty spring
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.
mean successful science
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
order two world
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
reality dancer hybridity
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
abuse charm loses
Power without abuse loses its charm.
may absurd
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
writing numbers unexpected
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
thinking
Sometime I think; and sometime I am.
cognition doe reign
Cognition reigns but does not rule.
important emotion
Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.
passion tension
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
sorry men giving
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 helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.
beautiful writing path
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.
reality hands wells
My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.