Quote

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

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
Serious
Ideas
Never
People

More quotes by Paul Valery

Image
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery
Image
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
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
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
Paul Valery
Image
The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.
Paul Valery
Image
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
Image
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
Image
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
Paul Valery
Image
What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
Paul Valery
Image
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
Image
My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
Paul Valery
Image
The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
Paul Valery
Image
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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
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
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
Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
Paul Valery
Image
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
Paul Valery
Image
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
Paul Valery