The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect. – Paul Valery
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature. – Paul Valery
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
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. – Paul Valery
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly. – Paul Valery
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
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. – Paul Valery
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. – Paul Valery
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
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh. – Paul Valery
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false. – Paul Valery
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows. – Paul Valery
