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Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

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
Nations
Inflict
Free
Propaganda
Given
Equally
Men
Equality
People
Test
Tests
Hardest
Liberty

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.
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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?
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The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
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Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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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.
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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.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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