Words matter. These are the best Paul Valery Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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.
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 future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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.
Politeness is organized indifference.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
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 businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
At times I think and at times I am.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
A man who is ‘of sound mind’ is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
