Quote

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

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
Books
Humidity
Book
Enemies
People
Weather
Content
Animals
Enemy
Fire
Animal

More quotes by 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
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
Paul Valery
Image
A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
Paul Valery
Image
What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?
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
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
Image
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery
Image
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
Image
A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.
Paul Valery
Image
My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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 only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
Paul Valery
Image
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
Image
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
Paul Valery
Image
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Paul Valery
Image
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
Paul Valery
Image
No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
Paul Valery
Image
I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
Paul Valery
Image
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
Image
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
Paul Valery