Paul Valery Quotes

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

Love is being stupid together.

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.

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

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.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm...you will triumph." Paul Valery via Miriam Toews

God created everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through” (Paul Valery).

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and through a determined analysis of definite and previously prescribed conditions, whatever its value might be once it had been produced, did not leave the mind of its creator without having modified him, and forced him to recognize and in some way reorganize himself. I said to myself that it was not the accomplished work, and its appearance and effect in the world, that can fulfill and edify us; but only the way in which we have done it.

I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who did not perceive what we perceived, were in a quite legitimate position. Their opinion was quite in order. One must not be afraid to say that the kingdom of letters is only a province of the vast empire of entertainment. One picks up a book, one puts it aside; and even when one cannot put it down one very well understands that this interest is related to the facility of pleasure. That is to say that every effort of a creator of beauty or of fantasy should be bent, by the very essence of his work, on contriving for the public pleasure which demands no effort, or almost none. It is through the public that he should deduce what touches, moves, soothes, animates or enchants the public. There are however several publics; amongst whom it is not impossible to find some people who do not conceive of pleasure without pain, who do not like to enjoy themselves without paying, and who are not happy if their happiness is not in some part their own contrivance through which they wish to realize what it costs them.

The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious).

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." —Paul Valery

Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'.

Disgusted with being right, with doing what succeeds, with the effectiveness of methods, try something else.

I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like out of what I was.

To see," the poet Paul Valery once wrote, "is to forget the name of the things that one sees." To see DNA is to forget its name or its chemical formula. Like the simplest of human tools-hammer, scythe, bellows, ladder, scissors-the function of the molecule can be entirely comprehended from its structure. To "see" DNA is to immediately perceive its function as a repository of information. The most important molecule in biology needs no name to be understood.

Omigod,” Valerie said. “Unh!” And her water broke. It was an explosion of water. A tidal wave. We’re talking Hoover Dam quantity water. Water everywhere . . . but mostly on Cal. Cal had been standing at the bottom of the gurney. Cal was totally slimed from the top of his head to his knees. It dripped off the end of his nose and ran in rivulets down his bald head. Valerie drew her legs up, the sheet fell away, and Cal gaped at the sight in front of him. Julie stuck her head around for a look. “Uh-oh,” Julie said, “there’s a foot sticking out. Guess this is going to be a breech baby.” That was when Cal fainted. CRASH. Cal went over like he was a giant redwood cut down by Paul Bunyan. Windows rattled and the building shook. Everyone clustered around Cal.

Valerie’s and Diego’s helpful candor and their ability to tell a story set the tone of the workshop. I blessed my luck that I would have a week or more with such wonderful students, and told them how—a traveler’s blessing—I felt I now had twenty-four friends.

El dolor es siempre pregunta, y el placer, respuesta

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” –Paul Valery

Work is never finished, only abandoned.

Il y a des personnages qui sentent que leurs sens les séparent du réel, de l'être. Ce sens en eux infecte les autres sens.

It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort.

There was nothing of interest in the anteroom but a book by Valery, which I began to browse through. Almost at once I came to the following passage, which was heavily underscored: Carried away by his ambition to be unique, guided by his ardor for omnipotence, the man of great mind has gone beyond all creations, all works, even his own lofty designs; while at the same time he has abandoned all tenderness for himself and all preference for his own wishes. In an instant he immolates his individuality. . . To this point its pride has led the mind, and here pride is consumed. . . . [The mind] . . . perceives itself as destitute and bare, reduced to the supreme poverty of being a force without an object. . . . He [the genius] exists without instincts, almost without images; and he no longer has an aim. He resembles nothing. Beside this passage, someone had scrawled in the margin: "The supreme genius has ceased at last to be human.