Paul Valery

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

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

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

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

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

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

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

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.

At times I think and at times I am.

Love is being stupid together.

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.

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.

To penetrate one's being one must go armed to the teeth.

Peace is a virtual mute sustained victory of potential powers against probable greeds.

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning we feel a certain void. 'Nothing in the paper today ' we sigh.