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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

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
Impossible
Almost
Wells
Everything
Well
Must
Poetry

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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.
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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.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
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History is the science of what never happens twice.
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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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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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It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
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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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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.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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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.
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Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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