Paul Valery Quotes

Life is an incurable disease.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we're all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we're all going to face it and a little silliness can help.

A human being is only breath and shadow.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

At my age flowers scare me.

A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.

This planet Earth, the act of putting a roof over our heads, our flesh and blood existence, it's all very temporary.

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

At the end of the day, we came into the world naked, and that's the way we're going to go.

I hate Sridevi. I hate her for making me realise that she, too, is finally only just a human being. I hate that her heart, too, has to beat to live.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

Mortalhood is a fine state to visit, but you'd better not call it home.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

There is nothing certain in a man's life but that he must lose it.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you're not.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.