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
civilization knows mortals
We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.
impossible said wells
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
order disorder human-condition
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
reality hands wells
My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.
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.
passion tension
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
important emotion
Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.
cognition doe reign
Cognition reigns but does not rule.
mind teeth needs
To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.
dance journey hiking
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
abandoned finished
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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.
mean successful science
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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.