Paul Valery Quotes
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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Science is a collection of successful recipes.
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To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.
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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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The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
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You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.
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The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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What is simple is false and what is not is useless.
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A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
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Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
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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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The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
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Do you not realise that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?
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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.
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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Politeness is organized indifference.
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I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
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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.
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To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all it means.
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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.
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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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It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
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A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.
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Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
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Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
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The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.
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