Quotes by Paul Valéry
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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.
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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.
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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.
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
Politeness is organized indifference.
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
Power without abuse loses its charm.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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