Paul Valery

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

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

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

A painter should not paint what he sees but what should be seen.

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.

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

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

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

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
Paul Valery - Tel Quel 2 (1943)
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Paul Valery - 1895
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.

Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.

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

Love is being stupid together.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

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