Top 159 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Valery

Love is being stupid together.

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

Politeness is organized indifference.

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

At times I think and at times I am.

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.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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.

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.

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.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.

Love is acting stupid together.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

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

The advantage of the incomprehensible is that it never loses its freshness.

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.

We hope vaguely but dread precisely.

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.