Thread by @KS1729

from the Analects by Paul Valery

“Nothing's more dangerous than the man who behaves well and thinks badly. The opposite or the counterpart of the hypocrite is much to be dreaded.”

“The mind ought to guard us against a position of glory or greatness, just as much as against the mediocrity and pettiness of our condition.”

“Intellectuals? Those who give values to what has none.”

“The greatest possible poet is—the nervous system. Inventor of everything—or say, rather, the only poet.”

“I like children because when they play, they play; when they cry, they cry, and the two states follow each other so
easily. They don't mix up these manifestations; each phase is
untainted by the other.

But we grownups...”

“Clear thinking often leads to doing nothing.”

“It would be a good thing now & then to assume that all the ideas to which we have given most thought, the fruit of long & studious meditation are false or absurd, even though we cannot see how this could be. One should treat severely all for which one has an innate preference.”

“Two fall into the torrent, one swims and the other drowns. Just so, in the confusion of the world of the mind, in the agitated tossing of question, reply, myths, and values, "genius," "madness": one swims, the other drowns.”

“Men differ by what they show, and have in common what they hide.”

“Credulity and Falsehoodcopulate, and give birthto Opinion.”

“A man had ticket No. 60015 in a lottery. No. 60016 was drawn. He thought he had "nearly" won. Everyone in every circumstance thinks like this. "I nearly fell, nearly died, nearly made a fortune." History teems with arguments of this kind.
There are degrees only in the IF.”

“It's almost unbelievable how obstinately man resists the facts of experience: the infinite difficulty he has in substituting what he has seen & touched for what he has fended & conceived to match the forms in his head. To be a mighty genius it would be enough not to imagine.”