Quotes By Paul Valery

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

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.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

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

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.

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 is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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

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 poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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

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.

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.

At times I think and at times I am.

Politeness is organized indifference.

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

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.

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

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