Paul Valéry
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.
Politics is the art of preventing people from sticking their noses in things that are properly their business.
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Love is being stupid together.
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.
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.
...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.