To see is to forget the name of what one sees.
Paul Valéry
Quotes
Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
Demosthenes
The Wind. The rush of unexpected events, and the doubts and criticisms of those around you, are like a fierce wind at sea. It can come from any point of the compass, and there is no place to go to escape from it, no way to predict when and in what direction it will strike. To change direction with each gust of wind will only throw you out to sea. Good pilots do not waste time worrying about what they cannot control. They concentrate on themselves, the skill and steadiness of their hand, the course they have plotted, and their determination to reach port, come what may.
Robert Greene
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Books have the same enemies as people; fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valéry
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Paul Valéry
Every man creates, without knowing it – Just as he breathes – But the artist feels himself creating – His act engages his whole being – His beloved pains fortify him
Paul Valéry, Inscription at the Palais de Chaillot
Thinker ! This ridiculous name – Yet it’s possible to find a man, neither philosopher nor poet, who can’t be defined by the object of his thought, nor by the quest for an external result, a book, a doctrine, a field of science, a truth… but who is a thinker in the way one is a dancer, making use of his mind as the latter uses his muscles and his nerves; someone who, perceiving his mental images and his expectations, his types of language and his possibilities, what he’s attentive to, his freedom of movement, his vagueness and precision, – perceives, predicts, specifies or abandons, gives himself free rein or denies it – circumscribing, outlining, possessing and losing himself… an artist not so much of knowledge as of his own self – which he prefers to all knowledge; for the latter is only ever the specific act which he himself can, in fact, always refine and make more true, more elegant, more astonishing, more universal or more singular – etc.
Paul Valéry
It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt