Zitat des Tages von Paul Valery:
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
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.
The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.
Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
Power without abuse loses its charm.
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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.
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
Politeness is organized indifference.
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.
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.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
We are enriched by our reciprocate differences.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
At times I think and at times I am.
That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
History is the science of things which are not repeated.
Love is being stupid together.
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.
Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.