Famous Quotes

Quotes by Paul Valery

• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
• An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
• God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
• God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
• History is the science of things which are not repeated.
• In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
• Love is being stupid together.
• Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
• Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
• Power without abuse loses its charm.
• Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
• The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
• 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 future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
• The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
• The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
• 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.