PAUL VALERY

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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

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

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

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

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.

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.

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

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

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

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

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

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

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

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.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

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

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.

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.

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

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.