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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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
Precise
Leads
Often
Ideas
Nothing
Men
More quotes by Paul Valery
Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
Paul Valery
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Paul Valery
No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.
Paul Valery
A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
Paul Valery
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
Paul Valery
to live means to lack something at every moment
Paul Valery
The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
Paul Valery
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery
The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
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
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
Paul Valery
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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
In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
Paul Valery
To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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
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
