Paul Valery
If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.Collection: Crush
A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.Collection: Art
History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.Collection: Giving
Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.Collection: Change
Science is a collection of successful recipes.Collection: Successful
I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.Collection: Order
The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.Collection: Dog
The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.Collection: Used
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Small Numbers
Talent without genius isn't much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.Collection: Genius
God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.Collection: Spiritual
Do you not realise that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?Collection: Dance
What is simple is false and what is not is useless.Collection: Honesty
A real writer can be recognized by the fact he doesn't find words. Therefore he must search for them and while doing that, he finds better ones.Collection: Real
There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.Collection: Writing
Love is acting stupid together.Collection: Stupid
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Art
Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."Collection: Idols
One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Art
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.Collection: Men
You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.Collection: Giving
In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.Collection: Math
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.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Hate
To hit someone means to adopt his point of view.Collection: Mean
Conscience reigns but it does not govern.Collection: Doe
We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.Collection: Civilization
All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.Collection: Past
The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vicesCollection: People
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.Collection: Love
Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.Collection: Spiritual
Peace is a virtual, mute, sustained victory of potential powers against probable greedsCollection: Peace
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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Attitude
Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.Collection: Betrayal
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.Collection: Mistake
If disorder is the rule with you, you will be penalized for installing order.Collection: Order
A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to ... emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.Collection: Giving
The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.Collection: Wind
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!Collection: Heart
Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.Collection: Light
Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.Collection: Order
Whatever we succeed in doing is a transformation of something we have failed to do. Thus, when we fail, it is only because we have given up.Collection: Failure
It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary - and not only necessary but urgent - to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.Collection: Fate
History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.Collection: History
Cognition reigns but does not rule.Collection: Doe