- ...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.
Paul Valery »
- A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery »
- A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
Paul Valery »
- A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.
Paul Valery »
- A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery »
- Books have the same enemies as people fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery »
- Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery »
- God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Paul Valery »
- God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valery »
- La politique est l'art d'empcher les gens de se mler de ce qui les regarde. (Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
Paul Valery »
- Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Paul Valery »
- Love is being stupid together.
Paul Valery »
- Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
Paul Valery »
- Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
Paul Valery »
- Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
Paul Valery »
- Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Paul Valery »
- That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery »
- That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery »
- The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valery »
- The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery »
- The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery »
- Two dangers constantly threaten the world order and disorder.
Paul Valery »
- What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valery »
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