Quotes from Paul Valery

If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.

Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

Love is acting stupid together.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

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.

An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.

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.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.

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

The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.

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.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.