Paul Valery People Quotations

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

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.

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

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

My poems mean what people take them to mean.

Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?

The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.