Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Valery

Valery flips the courtroom: the moment you think you are sentencing someone else, you are the one on trial. The line works because it treats judgment not as a moral service but as an unintentional autobiography. Your verdicts leak your cravings and fears. Condemn extravagance and you may be confessing envy; sneer at sentimentality and you’re advertising your own panic around feeling. Valery isn’t offering a pious warning against criticism so much as diagnosing a psychological tell: pronouncing on others is a virtuoso way of revealing yourself while pretending you’re doing the opposite.

The phrasing is coolly surgical. “Our judgments judge us” is a tight chiasmus that turns a familiar act into a boomerang. Then he sharpens it with “more ingeniously,” a sly word that suggests the ego’s craftiness: we invent principled reasons to mask the messier motives underneath. “Attitude” matters, too. He’s not talking about careful evaluation; he’s talking about posture, that habitual tilt of superiority people adopt when they want to feel coherent, clean, and above the fray.

Placed against Valery’s era - post-Dreyfus France, the rise of ideological camps, the modernist suspicion of easy certainties - the sentence reads like a refinement of skepticism. It targets the social theater of condemnation: the way public moralizing can become a performance of identity. Valery implies that the loudest certainty often signals the most vulnerable spot, and that the real content of a judgment is rarely the person judged. It’s the judge, speaking in disguise.