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

Paul Valery

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Paul Valery
Age: 73 †
Born: 1871
Born: October 30
Died: 1945
Died: July 20
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Writer
Cette
Paul Ambroise Valéry
Paul Ambroise Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valéry
Paul Valery
Paul-Ambroise Valery
Business
Art
Political
People
Preventing
Politics

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Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.
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There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life: 1) To produce them or 2) To plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
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The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.
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A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
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My hand feels touched as well as it touches reality says this, and nothing more.
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
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Photography invites one to give up any attempt to delineate such things as can delineate themselves.
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History is the science of things which are not repeated.
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
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Stupidity is not my strong suit.
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A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
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Every man expects some miracle — either from his mind or from his body or from someone else or from events.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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The mere notion of photography, when we introduce it into our meditation on the genesis of historical knowledge and its true value, suggests the simple question: Could such and such a fact, as it is narrated here, have been photographed?
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That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
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Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.
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The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.
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We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.
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