Quotes By Paul Valery

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Love is being stupid together.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.