Paul Valery

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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.

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

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

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.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

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