Top 120 Paul Valéry Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.”

— Paul Valéry

102. “The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”

— Paul Valéry

103. “What Degas called ‘a way of seeing’ must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.”

— Paul Valéry

104. “To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.”

— Paul Valéry

105. “What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.”

— Paul Valéry

106. “A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn’t find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones.”

— Paul Valéry

107. “In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.”

— Paul Valéry

108. “Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.”

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

110. “Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.”

— Paul Valéry

111. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

112. “Stupidity is not my strong suit.”

— Paul Valéry

113. “The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.”

— Paul Valéry

114. “No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.”

— Paul Valéry

115. “The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.”

— Paul Valéry

116. “Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”

— Paul Valéry

117. “Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.”

— Paul Valéry

118. “Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.”

— Paul Valéry

119. “Peace is a virtual, mute, sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.”

— Paul Valéry

120. “A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.”

— Paul Valéry

121. “To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.”

— Paul Valéry

122. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

123. “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?”

— Paul Valéry

124. “The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.”

— Paul Valéry

125. “Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.”

— Paul Valéry

126. “The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.”

— Paul Valéry

127. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

128. “In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.”

— Paul Valéry

129. “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.”

— Paul Valéry