Quotes from Paul Valery

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Whoever wants to accomplish great things must devote to a lot of profound thought to details.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

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

Politeness is organized indifference.

Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.

To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

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

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

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.

What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

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.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.