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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.
-Paul Ambroise Valery, Economic Sophisms
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Attitude
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Our judgments judge us; and nothing reveals us or exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Belief
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That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
-Paul Ambroise Valery, La Jeune Parque, Le Cimitiere Marin
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Creativity
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Endings
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Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends some thing.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Mistakes
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Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Poetry
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Science
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Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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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 Ambroise Valery
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Self Respect
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What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Thought
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Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Time
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The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Truth
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Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Work
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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 Ambroise Valery
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Worry
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If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. nothing in the paper today , we sigh.
-Paul Ambroise Valery
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Books by and about Paul Ambroise Valery