(1871–1945)
French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Paul Valéry
Like a stone too heavy for me to move;
like a solid door which I can barely rattle and cannot open;
like a fruit-cluster hanging too high which my upward leapings can but touch with fingertips;
thus — what she can give and will not.
Cahiers/Notebooks, Volume 1 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2000), 550.
The right sort of love is recognized by the sort of joy, of general excitement, of exultant life which the presence of someone produces in us and which distinguishes them. You feel better when with them.
Cahiers/Notebooks, Volume 1 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 2000), 553.
You ask me, most politely, to do something I disapprove—that is, to pluck from Victor Hugo’s writings some fragment that seems to me of especial excellence. I do not at all like this process of detaching from a work the purest or happiest portion of it. Is this not treating poems as children treat cakes—picking out the almonds to crunch and giving the rest to the dog?
“Victor Hugo’s Finest Stanza: Reply to an Inquiry,” in The Art of Poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 260.