Top 120 Paul Valéry Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Paul Valéry

Featured in: Short Positive Quotes, Short Inspiring Quotes, Awakening Quotes, Quotes About Dreams, Wednesday Inspirational Quotes

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

— Paul Valéry

3. “Love is being stupid together.”

— Paul Valéry

Featured in: Love Quotes, Silly Quotes, Romantic Quotes, Valentine's Day Quotes, Funny Love Quotes

4. “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 Valéry

5. “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.”

— Paul Valéry

6. “A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun.”

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

8. “Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

— Paul Valéry

Featured in: Hiking Quotes

9. “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”

— Paul Valéry

10. “Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .”

— Paul Valéry

11. “Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.”

— Paul Valéry

12. “We need to wake up from a thought that lasts too long.”

— Paul Valéry

13. “Every beginning is a consequence – every beginning ends some thing.”

— Paul Valéry

14. “An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.”

— Paul Valéry

15. “We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.”

— Paul Valéry

16. “Politeness is organized indifference.”

— Paul Valéry

17. “An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.”

— Paul Valéry

18. “Power without abuse loses its charm.”

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

20. “Science is a collection of successful recipes.”

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

23. “We hope vaguely but dread precisely.”

— Paul Valéry

24. “Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.”

— Paul Valéry

25. “One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”

— Paul Valéry

26. “What golden hour of life, what glittering moment will ever equal the pain its loss can cause?”

— Paul Valéry

27. “Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences.”

— Paul Valéry

28. “To enter into your own mind you need to be armed to the teeth.”

— Paul Valéry

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

— Paul Valéry

30. “There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.”

— Paul Valéry

31. “Everything changes but the avant-garde.”

— Paul Valéry

32. “Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.”

— Paul Valéry

33. “One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.”

— Paul Valéry

34. “History is the science of what never happens twice.”

— Paul Valéry

35. “Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.”

— Paul Valéry

36. “If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.”

— Paul Valéry

37. “Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.”

— Paul Valéry

38. “A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.”

— Paul Valéry

39. “Talent without genius isn’t much, but genius without talent is nothing whatsoever.”

— Paul Valéry

40. “History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.”

— Paul Valéry

41. “Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”

— Paul Valéry

42. “Having precise ideas often leads to a man doing nothing.”

— Paul Valéry

43. “Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.”

— Paul Valéry

44. “Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.”

— Paul Valéry

45. “Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”

— Paul Valéry

46. “Whatever we succeed in doing is a transformation of something we have failed to do. Thus, when we fail, it is only because we have given up.”

— Paul Valéry

47. “To penetrate one’s being, one must go armed to the teeth.”

— Paul Valéry

48. “My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!”

— Paul Valéry

49. “Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.”

— Paul Valéry

50. “The dog has made man their God, if the dog was an atheist, it would be perfect.”

— Paul Valéry