Paul Valery
Paul Valery
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valérywas a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 October 1871
CountryFrance
hate mean self
We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
heart islands grace
His heart is a desert island.... The whole scope, the whole energy of his mind surround and protect him; his depths isolate him and guard him against the truth. He flatters himself that he is entirely alone there.... Patience, dear lady. Perhaps, one day, he will discover some footprint on the sand.... What holy and happy terror, what salutary fright, once he recognizes in that pure sign of grace that his island is mysteriously inhabited!...
simple complicated understood
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
thinking men complicated
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
men skins machinery
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
art business people
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
betrayal kind fidelity
Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
despair
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.
art destiny men
The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.
book animal weather
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
being-yourself being-single men
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
order disorder human-condition
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.
dream silence triumph
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
spiritual loneliness drinking
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.