Paul Valery

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

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

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.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

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

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Politeness is organized indifference.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

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

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

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

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

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

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

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.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

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.

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.