Quotes by Paul Valery

• Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
• That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
• Politeness is organized indifference.
• Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
• Power without abuse loses its charm.
• Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
• Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
• That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
• 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.
• The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
• The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
• Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
• 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.
• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
• 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.
• We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
• The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
• An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
• The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
• Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
• A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
• 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 man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
• A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
• A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
• At times I think and at times I am.
• In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
• 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.
• Love is being stupid together.
• A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
• Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
• History is the science of things which are not repeated.
• God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
• God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
• Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.