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 Valéry
An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.
– Paul Valéry
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary.
– Paul Valéry
Love is being stupid together.
– Paul Valery
Politeness is organized indifference.
– Paul Valéry
At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.
– Paul Valery
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
– Paul Valéry
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
– Paul Valery
A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.
– Paul Valéry
One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.
– Paul Valery
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
– Paul Valery
History is the science of what never happens twice.
– Paul Valery
But hope is only man’s mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind.
– Paul Valery
Nothing beautiful can be summarized.
– Paul Valéry
I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.
– Paul Valery
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
– Paul Valéry
We hope vaguely but dread precisely.
– Paul Valéry
Sometimes I think and other times I am.
-Paul Valery
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
– Paul Valéry
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
– Paul Valery
Stupidity is not my strong point.
– Paul Valery
My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!
– Paul Valery
Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.
– Paul Valéry
A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
– Paul Valéry
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
– Paul Valéry
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
– Paul Valery
Power without abuse loses its charm.
– Paul Valery
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
– Paul Valery
Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions.
– Paul Valery
To live means to lack something at every moment.
– Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
– Paul Valery
To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.
– Paul Valéry
History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.
– Paul Valéry
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion,another reads playfully.
– Paul Valery
There are two ways to acquire the niceties of life:
1) To produce them or
2) To plunder them.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
– Paul Valéry