# Monsieur Teste

- Author: [Paul Valéry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-valery.md)
- Quotes: 2
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-valery/monsieur-teste

## Quotes

> Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many persons; I have visited several countries; I have taken part in various enterprises without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have had women. I can now recall a few hundred faces, two or three great spectacles, and the substance of perhaps twenty books. I have not retained the best nor the worst of these things: what could stay with me did.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-valery/monsieur-teste/stupidity-is-not.md)

> This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or . . inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.
>
> Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self.
>
> I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paul-valery/monsieur-teste/this-character-out.md)