Paul Valery Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
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.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
A man who is "of sound mind" is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
At times I think and at times I am.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 14
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
Love is being stupid together.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
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.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
Politeness is organized indifference.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
Power without abuse loses its charm.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 33
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
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.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
Paul Valery | Refcard PDF ↑
