Quotes by poet Paul Valery

[Doreen Peri]

“My life’s ambition,” Valéry wrote, “has only ever been to stir a little interest in minds that are not easily satisfied.”

“Everything I’ve accomplished all my life since I was twenty, consists of nothing other than a kind of perpetual preparation, without purpose, without end … without practical or external goal,”

“The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be”

“There’s always a rather sordid side to literature, a lurking deference to one’s public. Hence the mental reservations, the ulterior motives basic to every form of charlatanism. Thus every literary production is an ‘impure’ product.”

“I would like to have classified and clarified my personal forms of thought, and learned to think within them in such a way that each new thought bore the imprint of the whole system generating it and was unmistakably a modification of a well-defined system.”

"Blessed are those writers who relieve us of the burden of thought and who dextrously weave a luminous veil over the complexity of things. Alas, gentlemen, there are others, whose existence must be deplored, who have have elected to strike out in the opposite direction. They have placed toil of the mind in the way of its pleasures. They offer us riddles. Such creatures are inhuman. "