Skip to content

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.

— Paul Valéry Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Another quote →

Topics

Mind

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)

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)

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

Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

All Paul Valéry quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

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.