A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
– Paul Valery
A man who is of sound mind is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
– Paul Valery
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
– Paul Valery
At times I think and at times I am.
– Paul Valery
Love is being stupid together.
– Paul Valery
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
– Paul Valery
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
– Paul Valery
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
– Paul Valery
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
– Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
– Paul Valery
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
– Paul Valery
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.
– Paul Valery
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
– Paul Valery
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
– Paul Valery
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
– Paul Valery
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.
– Paul Valery
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
– Paul Valery
Power without abuse loses its charm.
– Paul Valery
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
– Paul Valery
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
– Paul Valery
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
– Paul Valery
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
– Paul Valery
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
– Paul Valery
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.