"That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false"
About this Quote
Consensus is Valery's favorite suspect. With one clipped sentence, he turns the warm blanket of "everyone knows" into a warning label. The line works because it yokes two ideas that polite society tries to keep separate: universality and error. We tend to treat widespread agreement as proof; Valery treats it as evidence of inertia, the intellectual equivalent of a crowded room with bad ventilation.
As a poet, Valery isn't offering a falsifiable rule so much as a posture toward thinking. "Almost certain" is doing sly work here. It avoids the absolutism he’s indicting, while still landing a near-verdict: when a belief becomes ambient, it stops being examined. The subtext is less "people are stupid" than "institutions are lazy". Shared beliefs often survive not because they are true, but because they are useful, soothing, or socially enforced. What "everyone, everywhere" really signals is power: a norm distributed through education, religion, manners, empire, language. Universality can be the footprint of uniform pressure.
The historical context matters. Valery writes in the long hangover of the 19th century's grand certainties and into a Europe wobbling toward catastrophe: nationalist myths, scientific positivism, inherited hierarchies presented as natural law. After World War I especially, "accepted by everyone" starts to sound less like wisdom and more like mass persuasion. The intent is to train the reader's reflexes: when a claim arrives with the chorus of unanimity, hear the machinery behind it, and start asking who benefits from it remaining unquestioned.
As a poet, Valery isn't offering a falsifiable rule so much as a posture toward thinking. "Almost certain" is doing sly work here. It avoids the absolutism he’s indicting, while still landing a near-verdict: when a belief becomes ambient, it stops being examined. The subtext is less "people are stupid" than "institutions are lazy". Shared beliefs often survive not because they are true, but because they are useful, soothing, or socially enforced. What "everyone, everywhere" really signals is power: a norm distributed through education, religion, manners, empire, language. Universality can be the footprint of uniform pressure.
The historical context matters. Valery writes in the long hangover of the 19th century's grand certainties and into a Europe wobbling toward catastrophe: nationalist myths, scientific positivism, inherited hierarchies presented as natural law. After World War I especially, "accepted by everyone" starts to sound less like wisdom and more like mass persuasion. The intent is to train the reader's reflexes: when a claim arrives with the chorus of unanimity, hear the machinery behind it, and start asking who benefits from it remaining unquestioned.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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