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

Power without abuse loses its charm.
Paul Valery

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

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Paul Valery

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

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
Paul Valery

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

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.
Paul Valery

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

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

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

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

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.
Paul Valery

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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.
Paul Valery

We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
Paul Valery