219 Quotes by Paul Valéry

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

Politeness is organized indifference.

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

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

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

We shall soon have to build heavily insulated cloisters where neither radio waves nor newspapers can come, in which ignorance of all politics will be guarded and cultivated. Speed, numbers, effects of surprise, contrast, repetition, size novelty, and credulity will be despised there. And thither, on certain days, visitors will come, to look through the iron bars at a few specimens of free men.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned