Quotations by Author

Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
French critic & poet [more author details]
Showing quotations 1 to 12 of 12 total
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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Paul Valery
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
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Paul Valery
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
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Paul Valery
In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished--a word that for them has no sense--but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.
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Paul Valery
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.
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Paul Valery
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
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Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Paul Valery
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
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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.
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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.
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Paul Valery, 1895
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
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Paul Valery, Tel Quel 2 (1943)

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Showing quotations 1 to 12 of 12 total
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