Blaise Pascal Quotes
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The entire ocean is affected by a single pebble.
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If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.
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Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday.
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The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.
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Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them.
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Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.
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There should be in eloquence that which is pleasing and that which is real; but that which is pleasing should itself be real.
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Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.
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One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.
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People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
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Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.
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Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
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Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.
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Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
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If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them.
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All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.
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The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.
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Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.
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Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.
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Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.
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Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.
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The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.
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I can readily conceive of a man without hands or feet; and I could conceive of him without a head, if experience had not taught me that by this he thinks, Thought then, is the essence of man, and without this we cannot conceive of him.
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There are three means of believing--by inspiration, by reason, and by custom. Christianity, which is the only rational institution, does yet admit none for its sons who do not believe by inspiration. Nor does it injure reason or custom, or debar them of their proper force; on the contrary, it directs us to open our minds by the proofs of the former, and to confirm our minds by the authority of the latter.