“Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux réjouiesCe toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!””
“Politeness is organized indifference.””
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.””
“God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.””
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.””
“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.””
“Sometime I think; and sometime I am.””
“God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly””
Paul Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher, known for his profound exploration of the complexities of the human mind and the nature of art. Born in a small town in southern France, Valér...
“Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.””
“The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!””
“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.””
“Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.””
“to live means to lack something at every moment””
“You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.””
“Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.””
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.””
“My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!””
“Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?””
“What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.””
“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.””