Quote

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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
Leads
Often
Ideas
Nothing
Men
Precise

More quotes by Paul Valery

Image
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
Paul Valery
Image
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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
No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
Paul Valery
Image
Cognition reigns but does not rule.
Paul Valery
Image
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
Image
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
Image
History is the science of what never happens twice.
Paul Valery
Image
Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery
Image
The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
Image
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery
Image
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
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
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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