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
advantage loses freshness
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.
dread
We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
relationship lying love-is
It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object.
time future trouble
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
light sun mindfulness
A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.
ideas people serious
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
war people profit
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.
dream memories people
History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.
love romantic valentines-day
Love is being stupid together.
men reality keeping-secrets
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
thinking sometimes
Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .
loss men lost-friendship
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
men two together
There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
education ignorance men
Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.