Thoughtful Thought

     In the case of writing, however, the author feels himself to be at once the source of energy, the engineer, and the restraints. One part of him is impulsion; another foresees, organizes, moderates, suppresses; a third part (logic and memory) maintains the conditions, preserves the connections, and assures some fixity to the calculated design. To write should mean to construct, as precisely and solidly as possible, a machine of language in which the released energy of the mind is used in overcoming real obstacles, hence the writer must be divided against himself. That is the only respect in which, strictly speaking, the whole man acts as author. Everything else is not his, but belongs to a part of him that has escaped. Between the emotion or initial intention and its natural ending, which is disorder, vagueness, and forgetting — the destiny of all thinking — it is his task to introduce obstacles created by himself, so that, being interposed, they may struggle with the purely transitory nature of psychic phenomena to win a measure of renewable action, a share of independent existence.
— Paul Valery, from "Note and Digression" (1919), in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, p. 72.

     Once it is agreed that our greatest insights are closely intermingled with our greatest chances of error, and that our average thoughts are of no great significance, then it is the part of us that chooses, the part that organizes, which must be exercised at every moment. The rest depends on no one, and we invoke it as vainly as we pray for rain. We may give it a name, torment it, make a god of it, but the only result will be a greater amount of pretense and fraud — things so naturally allied with intellectual ambition that one hardly knows whether they are its cause or its effect. The practice of taking a hypallage for a discovery, a simile for a demonstration, a vomit of words for a torrent of capital information, and oneself for an oracle — that is our infirmity from birth.
— Paul Valery, Ibid., pp. 76-77.

....But it followed that  the cult and contemplation of the principles that govern every work of art made it more and more difficult for him to exercise his own art, while giving him fewer and fewer occasions for employing his prodigious resources of execution. In truth we need two lives: one of total preparation, the other of total development.
— Paul Valery, from "I Would Sometimes Say to Mallarmé...", Ibid.,
p. 292.

....This dazzling line by Leonardo: "Le soleil jamais n'a vu d'ombre" (The sun has never seen shade). Nothing as good as that (the naïveté) in Pascal.
                                                                       23:175
— Paul Valery, Ibid., p. 349.

Alas! what can they teach, and not mislead;
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the world began, and how man fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending?
Much of the Soul they talk, but all awry,
And in themselves seek virtue, and to themselves
All glory arrogate, to God give none,
Rather accuse him under usual names,
Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite
Of mortal things. Who therefore seeks in these
True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion
Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,
An empty cloud. However, many books
Wise men have said are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)
Uncertain and unsettl'd still remains,
Deep verst in books and shallow in himself.
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge;
As Children gathering pebbles on the shore.
....
— John Milton, from Paradise Regained, Book IV, ll. 309-330.