Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are… — Paul Valery Copy Share Image
In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished a word that for them has no sense but abandoned; and… — Paul Valery Copy Share
“O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is… — Paul Valéry Copy Share
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of… — Paul Valery Copy Share
“I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who did not… — Paul Valery Copy Share
“Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.” — Paul Valéry Copy Share
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. — Paul Valery Copy Share
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly. — Paul Valery Copy Share
The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect… — Paul Valery Copy Share
To be sincere means to be the same person when one is with oneself; that is to say, alone - but that is all… — Paul Valery Copy Share
Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer… — Paul Valery Copy Share
