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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.
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
Seeking
Poet
Poetry
Less
Words
Predominant
Art
Rhythms
Ideas
Consists
Work
Rhythm
More quotes by Paul Valery
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
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
A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
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
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery
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
At times I think and at times I am.
Paul Valery
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
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valery
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
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valery
Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
Paul Valery
One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
Paul Valery
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.
Paul Valery
If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
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