Paul Valery Quotes - Page 6

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• What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

  Paul Valery

  Pain, Loss, Golden

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• Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

  Paul Valery

  Mean, Successful, Science

  'Moralitès' (1932) p. 41

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• 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 Valery

  Writing, Numbers, Unexpected

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• In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

  Paul Valery

  Impossible, Said, Wells

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• ...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

  Song, Hands, Musical

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• 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 Valery

  Nerves, Looks, Lions

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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.

  Paul Valery

  Mean, Sincerity, Sincere

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• Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.

  Paul Valery

  Photography, Giving Up, Giving

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• The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

  Paul Valery

  Truth, Enough, Gross

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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.

  Paul Valery

  Art, Eye, Men

  "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci". Book by Paul Valery, 1895.

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• My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.

  Paul Valery

  Reality, Hands, Wells

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• 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 Valery

  May, Absurd

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• History is the science of things which are not repeated.

  Paul Valery

  Science

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• Sometimes I think and other times I am.

  Paul Valery

  Thinking, Sometimes, Thoughts And Thinking

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• Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

  Paul Valery

  Thinking

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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.

  Paul Valery

  Men, Ideas, Mind

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• My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

  Paul Valery

  Dream, Struggle, Soul

  "Dialogues" by Paul Valery, translated by William McCausland Stewart, Bollingen Series XLV 4/Princeton University Press, (p. 27), 1921.

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• What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

  Paul Valery

  Degas, Way, Bears

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• Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

  Paul Valery

  Photography, Eye, Thanks

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• Poems are never finished - just abandoned

  Paul Valery

  Abandoned, Finished

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

  Paul Valery

  Motive, Settlement, Treaties

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• It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.

  Paul Valery

  Mean, Law, Affection

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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.

  Paul Valery

  Mean, Men, Expression

  "Reflections on the World Today" by Paul Valery, (p. 42), 1931.

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

  Paul Valery

  Men, Mad, Portraits

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• The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.

  Paul Valery

  Oracles, Folly, Oneself

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