Paul Valery
Beware of what you do best; its bound to be a trap.Collection: Advice
Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.Collection: Men
Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Nerves
The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.Collection: Truth
My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.Collection: Reality
Great things are accomplished by those who do not feel the impotence of man. This is a precious gift.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Mean
Sometimes I think and other times I am.Collection: Thinking
Everything changes but the avant-garde.Collection: Avant Garde
Sometime I think; and sometime I am.Collection: Thinking
My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Art
What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.Collection: Degas
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Photography
Poems are never finished - just abandonedCollection: Abandoned
The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.Collection: Motive
It is a law of nature that we defend ourselves from one affection only by means of another.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Mean
Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.Collection: Mind
What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?Collection: Pain
Stupidity is not my strong suit.Collection: Strong
The folly of mistaking oneself for an oracle is built right into us.Collection: Oracles
From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.Collection: Photography
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?Collection: Photography
The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.Collection: Art
The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.Collection: Advantage
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.Collection: Giving
Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.Collection: Rights
[Beauty is] that which makes us despair.Collection: Despair
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.Collection: Dance
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.Collection: Simple
Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.Collection: Ideas
One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.Collection: Light
If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.Collection: Love You
We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.Collection: Courage
No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.Collection: Art
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.Collection: Men
History is the science of what never happens twice.Collection: Happens
My poems mean what people take them to mean.Collection: Mean
Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.Collection: Powerful
A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.Collection: Light
A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.Collection: Writing
Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.Collection: Art
Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?Collection: Real
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.Collection: Beautiful