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.

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

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.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Love is being stupid together.

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

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.