Talk:Paul Valéry

whatever ignorant but assertive wikiman accused me of editing in a "nonsense" quote should read the quotation intro to Cormac McCarthy's "blood meridian", and educate themselves, before they eat their foot in public. Its the "blood and time" quote.

—This unsigned comment is by Zxcv (talk • contribs) .

The quote has been restored, with a sourced citation. ~ Aquarius 18:54, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Paul Valéry. --Antiquary 18:11, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

• 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 man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

• 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.

• Ma main se sent touchée aussi bien qu’elle touche ; réel veut dire cela, et rien de plus.
  • Translation: 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.

• On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayé d’inventer.
  • Translation: We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.

• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

• The future is not what it used to be.

• The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

• It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increasing aversion to sustained effort.
  • Quoted by Walter Benjamin in "The Storyteller", Illuminations, p. 93, but no source is given other than "Valéry concludes his observations with this sentence."

La guerre, c'est un massacre ...

La guerre, c'est un massacre de gens qui ne se connaissent pas, au profit de gens qui se connaissent, mais ne se massacrent pas.

May I suggest to remove this quote from the page or to label it Misattributed? The source given: Bizarre, issues 24-31 (1962) p. 102, is a sick joke. The french quarterly fr:w:Bizarre (revue), "revue trimestrielle", appeared from 1953 to 1968 and published 48 numbers: 24/25 (Cinéma fantastique: L'epouvante, 96 pages) was the issue for "3me Trimestre 1962", 26 (Discours [...] a propos d'un épisode mal connu de la jeunesse de Degas, 46 pages) for "4me Trimestre 1962", and 27 (Maisons de Paris 1900) for "1er Trimestre 1963". Although the quote is quite popular in France, fr:Paul Valéry does not list it. The Municipal Library of Lyon, when asked in December 2015, was unable to trace it to Paul Valéry, guichetdusavoir.eu. --Vsop.de (talk) 07:20, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Misattributed should be better. 151.51.7.51 21:16, 25 February 2022 (UTC)