"Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature"
About this Quote
Valery draws a bright, almost insolent line between what reliably works and everything that merely sounds like it should. Calling science an “aggregate of… recipes” is deliberately deflating: not grand theory, not metaphysical truth, but repeatable procedure. The phrase “always successful” is the provocation. Science, in his formulation, earns its authority only when it cashes out in results you can reproduce on demand. No romance, no priesthood, just the cold comfort of a method that delivers.
Then comes the dagger: “All the rest is literature.” From a poet, that’s not self-hatred so much as a surgical demotion of most human talk. Valery is skewering our habit of draping uncertainty in eloquence. When knowledge fails to harden into dependable practice, we retreat to narrative, persuasion, ideology, even philosophy-the verbal arts that can’t be falsified but can be made convincing. “Literature” here isn’t simply novels; it’s the whole realm where language performs rather than proves.
The subtext is a warning about prestige. People borrow the costume of science to sanctify their guesses, while poets (and pundits) trade in ambiguity with a straight face. Valery wrote in an era intoxicated by scientific modernity and wounded by mechanized war; he saw both the power and the limits of technical mastery. The line lands because it’s both humble and ruthless: it grants science no special access to meaning, only to success, and it exposes how much of what we call “knowing” is really storytelling with better manners.
Then comes the dagger: “All the rest is literature.” From a poet, that’s not self-hatred so much as a surgical demotion of most human talk. Valery is skewering our habit of draping uncertainty in eloquence. When knowledge fails to harden into dependable practice, we retreat to narrative, persuasion, ideology, even philosophy-the verbal arts that can’t be falsified but can be made convincing. “Literature” here isn’t simply novels; it’s the whole realm where language performs rather than proves.
The subtext is a warning about prestige. People borrow the costume of science to sanctify their guesses, while poets (and pundits) trade in ambiguity with a straight face. Valery wrote in an era intoxicated by scientific modernity and wounded by mechanized war; he saw both the power and the limits of technical mastery. The line lands because it’s both humble and ruthless: it grants science no special access to meaning, only to success, and it exposes how much of what we call “knowing” is really storytelling with better manners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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