Paul Valery Quotes

I think everybody has a secret life.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

All of us are private to ourselves. Nobody ever really knows anybody else. Everybody in the world keeps something to themselves.

The place you have to start to be any good at this, at acting, is with yourself. Everything is inside of you, all of it - the murderer, the great mother, the therapist, the husband. Everything is inside of us.

None can be so true to your secret as yourself.

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

It’s lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We’d all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

What's in your soul is in your soul.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

Any human being has private thoughts.

I want people to see what's inside my head rather than just looking at me.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things.

Some things I have to keep to myself.

One of those quiet types who logs a lot of time in the bedlam of her head, I sometimes need to be startled awake to the fact that the outside world still exists.

I think of the part of me that writes as the most private self. It's the part that's engaged the least with the rest of the world's needs.

It was funny to hear her voice aloud. Her thoughts and perceptions usually existed so deep inside her, they rarely made it to the surface without a deliberate effort.