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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.

— Paul Valéry

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More quotes by Paul Valéry

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

L'Âme et la danse (1921)

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.

Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

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

L'Âme et la danse (1921)

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

Tel Quel (1943)

To construct oneself, to know oneself—are these two distinct acts or not?

Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Valéry (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.