Paul Valery Quotes

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

I don’t know what I’m looking for.” “What not?” “Because … because … I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.

The world is too full of information.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

The thing I have in common with Donald Trump is about a dozen years ago, we got a "Man of the Year" award in New York City, the Hotel Plaza from the USO. So I met him once and I found him to be very personable. He asked excellent questions throughout the 45 minutes that I was with him. Very, very engaged and very curious about the world and its complexity. Something, let's be honest, that he and many of his close in advisers that he's selected don't have a lot of knowledge about.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.

Thanks to my computer, I have now achieved a much higher state of disorganization.

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

There will never be a perfectly good or bad world, because the very idea is a contradiction in terms.

Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?

It is our knowledge - the things we are sure of - that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.

With knowledge grows doubt.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I'd been afraid for a long time, I'd been afraid for a long time. There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.