Frases de Paul Valéry

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“La violencia es siempre un acto de debilidad y generalmente la operan quienes se sienten perdidos.”

“Lo que más irrita a los tiranos es la imposibilidad de poner grilletes al pensamiento de sus subordinados.”

“No sé qué es la conciencia de un tonto; pero la de un hombre intelectual está llena de tonterías.”

“En paz, la hostilidad de los hombres entre sí se muestra a través de creaciones en vez de mostrarse a través de destrucciones, como sucede en la guerra.”

“Ninguna cosa impuesta por la violencia será duradera. La violencia lleva implícita en sí misma la debilidad.”

“Lo más profundo que hay en el hombre es la piel.”

“Todo hombre lleva en sí un dictador y un anarquista.”

“Un hombre competente es un hombre que se equivoca según las reglas.”

“¡Admirable parentesco matemático entre los hombres! ―Qué decir de esta selva de relaciones y correspondencias―. (No tenemos ni siquiera la mitad de las palabras que tenían los romanos para hablar de ello.) ¡Qué mezclas y qué difusiones!
Siento infinitamente el poder, el querer porque siento infinitamente lo informe y el azar que los recubre, los tolera y tiende a volver a comenzar su libertad fatal, su figura indiferente, su nivel de igual riesgo.”

“Un hombre solo siempre está en mala compañía.”

“En toda cosa inútil hay que ser genial o no meterse con ella.”

“La educación profunda consiste en deshacer y rehacer la educación primera.”

“Las obras no se acaban, se abandonan.”

“Lo peor de la filosofía es que es una cosa personal y no lo quiere ser.”

“Los libros tienen los mismos enemigos que el hombre. El fuego, la humedad, los animales, el tiempo y su propio contenido.”

“Todos nuestros enemigos son mortales.”

“¿Qué sería, pues, de nosotros, sin la ayuda de lo que no existe?”

“La guerra es una masacre entre gente que no se conoce, para provecho de gente que sí se conoce pero que no se masacra.”

“El dolor es siempre pregunta, y el placer, respuesta”

“El primer verso lo facilitan los dioses, los demás los hace el poeta.”

“El pintor no debe llevar al lienzo lo que ve sino lo que verá.”

“El viento se levanta, hay que intentar vivir.”

“Casi todos los libros que aprecio, y absolutamente todos los que me han servido para algo son difíciles de leer. El pensamiento puede abandonarlos, no puede recorrerlos. Unos me han servido aunque eran difíciles, otros porque lo eran”.

“Pensad en lo que hace falta para gustar a tres millones de personas. Paradoja: hace falta menos que para gustar a 100. No escribo /no escribiría / para personas que no pudieran darme una cantidad de tiempo y una calidad de atención comparables a la que yo les doy”.”

“No hay que llamar ciencia más que al conjunto de fórmulas que siempre tiene tanto éxito. Todo el resto es literatura.”

“¡Vamos! ¡En pie! ¡Surge! ¡Escucha!¡Escucha! ¡Despierta! Rompe tus cadenas; sé. Sal de las sombras. Arráncate de la noche; emerge; ¡En pie! ¡En pie! ¡Endurécete! que aparezca tu fuerza. Y que tus ojos sean una corona de los más claros ojos. Corónate. Compón tu mirada. Siéntete todo el instrumento de este día que empieza y del acto que te llama.”

“Bajo los nombres de previsión y de traición, el futuro y el pasado, que son perspectivas imaginarias, dominan y limitan el presente.”

“Un poema nunca está acabado, solamente abandonado.”

“Unos tienen ingenio para hacer cosas bellas, otros para dar a entender que las cosas que hacen son bellas. Son dos ingenios diversos, pero ambos eficaces.”

“Un estado es más fuerte cuanto más puede consentir en su seno lo que actúa en contra suya.”

“Nuestros pensamientos más importantes son los que contradicen nuestros sentimientos.”

“La muerte despoja a la vida de toda seriedad.”

“La inspiración (poética) es la hipótesis que reduce al autor a un papel de observador.”

“La definición de lo bello es fácil: es lo que desespera.”

“La buena sociedad es una horda formada por dos poderosas tribus: los que se aburren y los que se aburren.”

“El gusto está hecho de mil repulsiones.”

“El burgués es la figura simétrica del romántico.”

“Bajo los nombres de previsión y de traición, el futuro y el pasado, que son perspectivas imaginarias, dominan y limitan el presente.”

“A man who is of 'sound mind' is one who keeps his inner madman under lock and key.”

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

“This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or.. inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.
Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self.
I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.”

“All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
Am I. Divine impatience also dies.”

“I cannot think that there exists more than one Sovereign Good.”

“Man discerns three great things in the All: he finds there his body, he finds there his soul—and then there is the rest of the world. Between these things there is an unceasing commerce, and sometimes even a confusion arises; but always after a certain time has elapsed, these three things come to be clearly distinguished from one another.”

“Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”

“[T]he soul of love is the invincible difference of lovers, while its subtle matter is the identity of their desires.”

“This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!”

“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.”

“Nay, who knows, Phaedrus, if the efforts of humans in their search for God, the observances, the prayers they essay, their obstinate will to discover the most efficacious… who knows if mortals will not finally discover a certitude—or an incertitude—stable and in exact conformity with their nature, if not with the very nature of God?”

“We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.”

“What are mortals for?—Their business is to know. Know? And what is to know?—It is assuredly: not to be what one is.—And so here are humans raving and thinking, introducing into nature the principle of unlimited error, and myriads of marvels!”

“An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.”

“What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.”

“My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!”

“I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.”

“Man can act only because he can ignore.”

“What's loftiest in the mind can only live through growth.”

“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."”

“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.”

“Now present here, the future takes its time.
The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
To some ineffably rarefied solution...
Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.”

“What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty —
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.”

“The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.”

“Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business.”

“There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.”

“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.”

“That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.”