Quote

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

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
Another
Playfully
Reads
Tension
Wrote
Passion

More quotes by Paul Valery

Image
Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
Paul Valery
Image
Poems are never finished - just abandoned
Paul Valery
Image
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
Image
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery
Image
Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
Paul Valery
Image
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
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
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 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
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
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery
Image
The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
Paul Valery
Image
What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
Image
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
Paul Valery
Image
The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
Paul Valery
Image
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
Image
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
Paul Valery
Image
Cognition reigns but does not rule.
Paul Valery
Image
Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
Paul Valery
Image
The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
Paul Valery