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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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'.

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

Work is never finished, only abandoned.

El dolor es siempre pregunta, y el placer, respuesta

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

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.

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.

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

Cleaning the master bedroom one day, Gloria found a Ziploc bag of oxy taped beneath Alex’s side of the bed. She was too scared to show it to Maggie, fearing that her boss would suspect her of snooping and maybe fire her. She showed the bag to Paul, who called his grandfather. Maybe he would know what to do. Gloria tended to tread lightly in a family with such fraught dynamics. She understood that Alex and Maggie were unlikely to help her if she tried to rein in the boys.

When Paul grew especially drunk, he seemed to become someone else. His face grew red, his blue eyes grew as wide as half dollars, and he began to sway and curse. His friends dreaded the emergence of the alter ego they had come to call Timmy. Timmy was a horror show, obnoxious, aggressive, defiantly irresponsible, sure to hijack any evening. In Timmy, the most unpleasant strains of the Murdaugh men rose to the surface: the assumption of entitlement, the brutality barely veneered by charm, the conviction that the family reigned over everything around them. The clearest sign of Timmy’s arrival was that Paul would strip off his clothes for no reason, even if others were watching, then splay his fingers wide and spread his arms as though he were flying. He no longer spoke, only screamed.

Back at bed 10, Randolph kept watch at his grandson’s bedside. An ER technician came in to request a urine sample for a drug screen. She was young and pretty, and as she handed him the bottle, Paul leered. “Would you hold it for me?” he asked. The tech ignored him. When she came back, collected the container, and turned to walk away, he pointed at her behind. “Oh wow, that’s nice.” Randolph III had heard enough. “Shut the fuck up!” he told his grandson. The old man wandered out into the hallway, muttering “He’s drunker than Cooter Brown.

Phillip called Keith Altman, Miley’s dad. Mallory and Miley had been best friends almost since they learned to walk. Phillip asked Keith what was happening. “They’re looking for her,” Keith said. “No, God,” Phillip said. “Not my child.” The Beaches could not help noticing that none of the Murdaughs—not Paul, not his father—had shown them the common courtesy of a phone call. More striking, they had not been contacted by any of the half dozen law enforcement agencies working the crash. Beverly Cook, Anthony’s mom, had offered to give the Beaches’ numbers to an officer at the scene, but he had said thank you, no.

Later that same day, Beverly’s son was standing with friends when he became vaguely aware of being watched. Anthony turned around to find Paul standing a few steps away, his red curls underneath a cap. “You know I love you, don’t you?” Paul said. “I love you, too,” Anthony said. “But you need to go.” Since the crash, Paul had exhibited signs of trying to make amends. He seemed to be drowning in guilt. He kept showing up at the causeway, staring awkwardly at his friends as though he wanted to say something but did not have the words. Phillip Beach had prayed with him, asking God to forgive Paul. Both of them had cried. Paul had texted Morgan and told her he was sorry for what he’d done. Morgan said she would pray for him and then had cut off communication. The others from the boat were now ignoring his texts, too. He was alone with his conscience.

Paul was treated like a wild animal,” he said. “If you let them be feral, they will be.” To Tinsley, it was clear that Paul’s recklessness had led directly to the death of Mallory Beach. But his parents’ indulgence had made the two of them even more culpable. He had collected photos and videos from social media that showed Paul swigging alcohol his parents had provided for him. In one video, Alex and Maggie watched as Paul stumbled through a game of beer pong. Another showed Alex sitting shirtless on the side of a boat while Morgan Doughty poured liquor down Paul’s throat. After the boat crash, Maggie had taken down many of the most shocking posts. But by then it was too late. Tinsley had already harvested the most damning photos and videos as evidence. If the case went to trial, he wanted the jury to see the ways Alex and Maggie had nurtured their son’s worst instincts, leading him to drunkenly crash one truck after another before finally driving the family’s boat into the bridge at Archers Creek.

With the criminal charges against Paul dropped in the boat case, Mark Tinsley tried to keep the pressure on SLED not to forget its investigation into Alex’s attempted cover-up in the emergency room. Connor Cook’s lawyer, Joe McCulloch—an old hand who knew a good stunt when he saw one—filed a hundred-page motion asking the judge in the boat crash case to let him take additional depositions from the DNR agents on the scene at Archers Creek. McCulloch understood that the judge would almost certainly not grant his motion. But he also knew that reporters were closely following every new document filed in the case. Even if his motion died in court, its contents would draw more attention to all the ways Alex had tried to hide his son’s responsibility for the crash.

A few weeks later, as the investigators dug deeper into the murder case, DNR released hundreds of pages of documents and several videos from the boat crash investigations. Internet sleuths scoured all of it, posting their theories about what had really happened on the night of the crash. They marked up photos of the boat, circling bloodstains they took as indications that Connor was on the passenger’s side at the time of the crash. They used Morgan Doughty’s and Connor Cook’s depositions to make a timeline of Paul’s previous drunken wrecks. They built string maps resembling the ones on the walls in TV cop shows, showing the relationships between the investigators and the Murdaughs. The revelations—about the family and the ways they hid their secrets—were piling up.

The week Maggie and Paul had been killed, the investigator had asked the firm repeatedly whether there was anything in Alex’s life, professionally or personally, that might make somebody want to harm his family. SLED had later interviewed Randy and John Marvin and asked if their brother was harboring any secrets, if he had any issues at work, any problems with drinking or drugs, any trouble at home. All of them—the law partners, Randy, and John Marvin—had assured the investigators that other than the tensions from the boat crash case, they knew of nothing out of the ordinary in Alex’s life.

That’s when it dawned on the detective why it was taking so long to make a case. All along, as he’d investigated Paul’s and Maggie’s murders, he had been struggling to get the truth from Alex. Now it was clear that others had been withholding key details. The law firm had been searching for the $792,000 since early June. Only hours before Paul and Maggie were gunned down, the firm’s CFO had confronted Alex over the missing check. Weeks later, as more evidence of Alex’s financial crimes was discovered, no one from the firm had shared that with SLED, either. They hadn’t told the authorities about Alex’s opioid habit. Any of these revelations would have helped Owen immensely. Even now, Alex’s brother and the other partner were quibbling over the definition of “missing.” At last Owen realized Alex was not the only one obscuring the truth.

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.

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.

The author attended the six-week trial of Alex Murdaugh in Walterboro, South Carolina, and accompanied the jurors on their visit to Moselle, the hunting estate where Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were killed.

Staring down at the prisoner in his shackles, Newman said he vividly remembered Alex standing poolside at the trial lawyer’s convention, just after Maggie and Paul were killed, seemingly having the time of his life, a friend to all. He said he could not reconcile the man he thought he knew with the man standing before him. Alex, he said, had become a void, unknowable even to himself. “You are empty.

Investigators had bungled the physical evidence in astonishing ways, Griffin said. They’d ignored tire tracks in the wet grass. They’d failed to take impressions of a footprint in the feed room or test Maggie’s and Paul’s clothing for DNA. They didn’t protect the information on Maggie’s phone, so her location data the night of the murders got rewritten. And somehow, Griffin said, Agent Owen had missed an email from SLED’s own lab that Alex’s shirt showed no human blood.

Paul was a source of constant stress. Maggie and Alex had never been able to control him, even when he was little. Some in town whispered that they’d barely tried. It had cost the family some friends over the years, parents who abandoned their desire to be close to the Murdaughs in order to keep their children away from Paul. He was kicked out of his public middle school, an achievement for a Murdaugh in a town where the family ran the school board.