Top 120 Paul Valéry Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.”

— Paul Valéry

102. “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

103. “Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.”

— Paul Valéry

104. “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 Valéry

105. “A poet’s work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.”

— Paul Valéry

106. “My poems mean what people take them to mean.”

— Paul Valéry

107. “The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.”

— Paul Valéry

108. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

109. “Every man expects some miracle – either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.”

— Paul Valéry

110. “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

111. “Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This is a precious gift.”

— Paul Valéry

112. “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

113. “The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.”

— Paul Valéry

114. “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

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

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

122. “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

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

— Paul Valéry

124. “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.”

— Paul Valéry

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

129. “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.”

— Paul Valéry