"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." (Paul Valéry, "Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci", 1895)
"La vie n'a pas le temps d'attendre la rigueur."
"Life doesn't have the time to wait for rigor." (Paul Valéry, "L'idee fixe" ["The Fix Idea"], 1932)
"Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science." (Paul Valéry, "Moralités" ["Morality"], 1932)
"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature." (Paul Valéry, "Moralités" ["Morality"], 1932)
"The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability." (Paul Valéry, The Nation, 1957)
"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)
"The machine rules. Human life is rigorously controlled by it, dominated by the terribly precise will of mechanisms. These creatures of man are exacting. They are now reacting on their creators, making them like themselves. They want well-trained humans; they are gradually wiping out the differences between men, fitting them into their own orderly functioning, into the uniformity of their own regimes. They are thus shaping humanity for their own use, almost in their own image." (Paul A Valéry, "Fairy Tales for Computers", 1969)
"Small unexplained facts always contain grounds for upsetting all explanations of 'big' facts." (Paul Valéry)
"Space is an imaginary body, as time is fictive movement. When we say 'in space' or 'space is filled with' we are positing a body." (Paul Valéry)
"The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect." (Paul Valéry)
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