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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
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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
Never
Abandoned
Poems
Finished
More quotes by Paul Valery
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
Paul Valery
Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.
Paul Valery
We are wont to condemn self-love but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
Paul Valery
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
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
We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
Paul Valery
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
Paul Valery
There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.
Paul Valery
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
Paul Valery
Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
Paul Valery
The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
Paul Valery
The mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.
Paul Valery
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery
Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
Paul Valery
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
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
A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
Paul Valery
