Paul Valéry
Aphorisms
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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.
Politeness is organized indifference.
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.
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Power without abuse loses its charm.
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.
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.
A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
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.
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
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.
Love is being stupid together.
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
At times I think and at times I am.
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
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