Quote

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Paul Valery

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Men
Leaves
Loss
Gone
Others
Great

More quotes by Paul Valery

Image
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Paul Valery
Image
History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.
Paul Valery
Image
If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Paul Valery
Image
The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
Paul Valery
Image
My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
Paul Valery
Image
History is the science of what never happens twice.
Paul Valery
Image
Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
Paul Valery
Image
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
Paul Valery
Image
One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
Paul Valery
Image
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
Image
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
Paul Valery
Image
What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
Paul Valery
Image
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery
Image
Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.
Paul Valery
Image
There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Paul Valery
Image
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery
Image
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
Paul Valery
Image
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
Image
The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
Paul Valery
Image
The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
Paul Valery