Paul Valery Biography Quotes 37 Report mistakes

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Born as	Paul Ambroise Valéry
Occup.	Poet
From	France
Born	October 30, 1871 Sète, France
Died	July 20, 1945 Paris, France
Cause	Heart attack
Aged	73 years

Early Life and Education
Paul Ambroise Valery was born in 1871 in Sete, a Mediterranean port in southern France. The coastal landscape and maritime light of his birthplace left a lasting mark on his imagination, a resonance that would eventually surface in one of his most celebrated poems, Le Cimetiere marin. He was educated in Montpellier, where he studied law to satisfy family expectations while pursuing a voracious private education in mathematics, philosophy, and literature. As a young reader, he admired the precision of classical thought and the discipline of geometry as much as the musicality of verse, inclinations that would later fuse in his exacting poetics.

In the early 1890s he began frequent visits to Paris, where he entered the literary circles around Stephane Mallarme. The famed Tuesday gatherings exposed him to exacting standards of form, intricate symbolism, and a conception of poetry as an art of intelligence. Among the friends and interlocutors he encountered were Pierre Louys and Andre Gide, both of whom would encourage his development and keep faith with his talent during a long period when he published very little verse.

Apprenticeship and the 1892 Decision
A formative shock came in 1892 in Genoa. During a night of intense inner crisis, Valery resolved to turn away from the fluctuations of personal emotion in literature and to devote himself to the systematic study of mind and form. He did not cease writing, but he abandoned the idea of publishing poetry for many years. The decision redirected his energy toward analysis, brevity, and discipline. It also shaped the persona that would become central to his thought: a self that observes its own operations with relentless clarity.

Out of these years arose a handful of early works that were more prose than poetry, though indelibly poetic in method. Introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vinci (1895) portrayed Leonardo as a model of the universal mind, and La Soiree avec Monsieur Teste (1896) presented an intelligence so lucid and impersonal that it seemed almost inhuman. These writings announced an orientation that placed investigation and consciousness at the center of his art.

The Havas Years and the Cahiers
From 1897, Valery earned his living as the private secretary to Edouard Lebey, an executive at the Havas news agency. The job was steady and unglamorous, but it gave him early morning hours for a discipline that would define his life: the daily notebooks known as the Cahiers. For decades, before dawn, he filled page after page with reflections on language, logic, physiology, dreams, attention, mathematics, and the craft of verse. The notebooks are one of the vast monuments of modern intellectual self-scrutiny, not designed for publication but for training a mind to think with rigor and suppleness.

In 1900 he married Jeannie Gobillard, a relation of the painter Berthe Morisot. The domestic steadiness of marriage, together with the routine of office work, fortified his strict schedule. Friends like Leon-Paul Fargue and Andre Gide continued to visit and to read him, defending his reputation even as the public had little new poetry by which to judge him. The private architecture of the Cahiers, nevertheless, was forming the principles that would make his later poems so compressed and crystalline.

Return to Poetry
The First World War and the insistence of friends helped to draw him back into print. After more than two decades without publishing verse, Valery brought out La Jeune Parque in 1917, a long and demanding poem that attracted immediate attention for its intellectual intensity and formal brilliance. He followed it with Charmes (1922), the collection that includes Le Cimetiere marin, a meditation composed with Sete in mind and with a prosody at once classical and audacious. These works established him as a major poet, admired for a mastery that seemed to reconcile elegance with the hardest kind of thought.

At the same time he developed a body of prose and dialogues that extended his formal inquiry. Eupalinos ou lArchitecte (1921) staged an imaginary conversation about form, architecture, and the soul of craft; the Variete series gathered essays in which he addressed literature, the arts, and the conditions of modern life with a lucid, often skeptical intelligence. His contemporaries, among them Paul Claudel and Gide, recognized in him a writer who made poetry itself an object of examination without sacrificing beauty.

Essayist, Critic, and Public Figure
In the aftermath of war, Valery reflected on the fragility of European culture. His essay La crise de lesprit (1919) famously cautioned that modern civilization had discovered itself to be mortal. The remark circulated widely as a summation of postwar disillusion and as a call for intellectual vigilance. Invitations multiplied, and he became a frequent speaker on literature, science, and the place of the arts in civic life. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1925, a recognition of his authority and the distinctness of his voice.

He also participated in international conversations about culture and education, contributing to committees associated with the League of Nations. There he encountered figures such as Henri Bergson and, in overlapping circles, Albert Einstein, sharing an interest in how the sciences and the humanities might be brought into a relation both critical and fruitful. Although he was skeptical of easy syntheses, he believed that clarity of method and responsibility of language were indispensable to public life.

Teaching and Late Activities
In the 1930s Valery extended his influence as a lecturer and teacher. He accepted honors and institutional roles, including a chair devoted to poetics and aesthetics, where he analyzed the labor of writing as a set of operations on memory, sensation, and form. He wrote on the visual arts with rare acuity, as in his meditations on drawing and dance, and he returned often to the exemplary figure of Leonardo as a patron saint of attention. Editors like Jean Paulhan at La Nouvelle Revue Francaise published his essays and occasional pieces, and he proved an elegant memorialist, able to evoke friends and elders with a detached yet humane voice.

Even in these public years, his morning practice of the Cahiers continued. He wrote not to accumulate a system but to refine problems, sketch procedures, and expose illusions of understanding. The notebooks served as a gymnasium for thought, their aphorisms and miniature treatises circulating among readers only gradually as selections appeared.

War Years and Death
The collapse of France in 1940 and the ambiguities of occupation and Vichy rule put Valery in a strained position. He safeguarded his independence, resisted pressures to conform, and at times paid a price in institutional setbacks. Yet he continued to write, to deliver measured public addresses, and to defend standards of intellectual honesty. He remained in contact with fellow writers who navigated the same troubled waters, including Gide and others who sought to preserve a space for literature amid constraints.

Valery died in 1945. He was laid to rest in Sete, in the cemetery above the sea that had furnished the landscape for one of his greatest poems. The return to his native shore sealed a life that, for all its Parisian fame, had begun and inwardly remained oriented by the Mediterranean horizon.

Style, Method, and Legacy
Valery forged a rare synthesis of classicism and modernity. He prized exact diction, measured rhythm, and the resources of traditional verse, but he used them to probe the mechanics of thought, sensation, and will. His poems concentrate the labor of consciousness: they move as an intelligence moves, testing phrases against experience, refining images until they achieve an equilibrium that feels both inevitable and hard won. The character of Monsieur Teste is the emblem of this aspiration to lucidity, and the Cahiers are its workshop.

His influence spread in multiple directions. Poets found in him a model of discipline; critics discovered new ways to think about the making of form; artists and musicians responded to his reflections on movement, line, and time. Colleagues and friends across generations, from Mallarme to Gide and Fargue, recognized that he had made the act of writing itself a subject of knowledge. He held that a poem is not a confession but a construction, and that the writer must be both artisan and experimenter.

Beyond individual works, Valery's enduring contribution lies in his example of attention. He showed how a life divided between private labor and public duty could remain faithful to an uncompromising ideal of exactness. In an age of upheaval, he insisted that culture survives by the daily acts of mind that restore clarity to language and measure to feeling. His books, essays, and dialogues, together with the immense body of the Cahiers, continue to challenge readers to think not only about what we say but about how we come to say it.

Our collection contains 37 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to Paul: Edmund Wilson (Critic), Stefan Zweig (Writer), Julien Benda (Philosopher)

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