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 Valéry

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

— Paul Valéry

Consciousness reigns but doesn't govern.

— Paul Valéry

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

— Paul Valéry

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

— Paul Valéry

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility: it contains the mind's promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not know, and because we do not know it, than what we know.

— Paul Valéry

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly

— Paul Valéry

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

— Paul Valéry

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.

— Paul Valéry

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

— Paul Valéry