Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

— Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry Quotes

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

— Paul Valéry

We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.

— Paul Valéry

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

— Paul Valéry

Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart’s beat.

— Paul Valéry

The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices.

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

— Paul Valéry

A poet’s work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

— Paul Valéry

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

— Paul Valéry

It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.

— Paul Valéry

If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.

— Paul Valéry

Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.

— Paul Valéry

The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.

— Paul Valéry

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

— Paul Valéry

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

— Paul Valéry

Disgusted with being right, with doing what succeeds, with the effectiveness of methods, try something else.

— Paul Valéry
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