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.”

“Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!
After such arrogance, after so much strange
Idleness — strange, yet full of potency —
I am all open to these shining spaces;
Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes,
Ghosting along — a ghost subduing me.”

“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.”

“If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.”

“The being filled with wonder is lovely, like a flower.”

“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.”

“The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.”

“In the Beginning was the Fable.”

“Most people in reasoning, dear Phaedrus, use notions that not only are "ready-made," but have actually been made by nobody. No one is responsible for them, and so they serve everyone badly.”

“Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All.”

“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.”

“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty. But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.”

“Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious.
But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.”

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.”

“The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”

“Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!”

“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.”

“The greatest liberty is born of the greatest rigor.”

“But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.”

“And do not humans strive in a thousand ways to fill or to break the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that affright them?”

“You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?”

“Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?”

“It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty.”

“A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.”

“A good poet is of no more use to his country than a good petanque player.”

“A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it-that is to say, gives it to the public.”

“My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.”

“Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”

“We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.”