It is Paul Valery, but per Adrian Kohn's A Way to Look at Things by Not Forgetting Their Names, Valery may be (intentionally?) misreading Blaise Pascal just to get a jibe in. See footnote 3, bottom of page 11: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674801
It is Paul Valery, but per Adrian Kohn's A Way to Look at Things by Not Forgetting Their Names, Valery may be (intentionally?) misreading Blaise Pascal just to get a jibe in. See footnote 3, bottom of page 11: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674801