Paul Valery

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

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

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

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

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

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

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

“History is the science of things which are not repeated.”

“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”

“Love is being stupid together.”

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

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

“Power without abuse loses its charm.”

“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.”

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

“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.”