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[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.

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
Despair
Beauty
Makes

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In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.
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Cognition reigns but does not rule.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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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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Poems are never finished - just abandoned
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
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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.
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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.
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We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
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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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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.
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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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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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The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.
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The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
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One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
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Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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