Quotes by Paul Valéry

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Classic: ... a writer who carries within him a critic whom he intimately associates with his things.

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Poetry: ... the art of abusing the resonance and occult sympathies of words.

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The contradictory condition of the artistic state: the artist must observe as if ignorant of everything and execute his work as if he knew everything.

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A work is constructed by a multitude of "spirits" and events (ancestors, states, hazards, previous writers, etc.) under the direction of the Author.

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A man who writes is never alone.

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My lyrics have the meaning attributed to them.

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The history of literature should not be the history of authors and the accidents of their fate or the fate of their works, but the history of the mind as a producer and consumer of literature. This history could be completed without mentioning any writer.

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Literature is and cannot be anything other than a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language.

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Poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, with the help of articulate language, those things or that thing that the screams, tears, caresses, kisses, sighs, etc. try to express. And which the objects seem to want to express in everything they have as an appearance of life or as an assumed purpose.

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The poetic idea is that which, put into prose, further advertises the verse.

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The task of the artist is to objectify and bring out the social and inner universe, in such a way that the public can see in itself and in the world what its orientational tendency usually convinces it to hide and ignore.

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An energetic person is one who, in all circumstances, instinctively chooses the decision that requires the greatest expenditure of energy. Risk is its thrill.

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To love glory, you have to care about people: you have to believe in them.

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To pass under a triumphal arch means also to pass under a yoke.

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If the self is hateful, loving your neighbor as yourself becomes an atrocious irony.