Paul Valery

God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

The sea, the ever renewing sea!

Stupidity is not my strong suit.

For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.

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

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

The wind is rising...we must attempt to live.

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

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.

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.