Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Valery

Valery skewers a certain intellectual vanity: our itch to feel newly enlightened even when we are only newly impressed. The line is built as a cascade of category errors-paradox dressed up as discovery, metaphor misfiled as proof, eloquence mistaken for truth. Each pairing exposes how easily style can impersonate substance, especially in cultures (and minds) that reward the appearance of insight over the slow labor of verification.

The subtext is less anti-poetry than anti-self-deception. Valery, a poet who also obsessed over method and the machinery of thought, is warning that the mind loves shortcuts that flatter it. A paradox feels like a breakthrough because it produces a jolt; a metaphor feels like evidence because it makes the world cohere; a torrent of words feels like knowledge because it creates momentum. The real punch lands in the final clause: "oneself for an oracle". Once you mistake your own rhetorical thrill for a signal of truth, you start treating your intuitions as verdicts.

Context matters: Valery is writing from the early 20th century, when grand systems, manifestos, and total explanations were in the air, and when language itself was being interrogated by modernism. His sentence is a prophylactic against the era's temptations, but it reads like a timeless diagnosis of punditry, theorizing, even late-night self-mythologizing. Calling the folly "inborn" is the grim joke: the problem isn't that we're occasionally fooled; it's that being fooled is one of our default settings, especially when the mistake makes us feel important.