Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Le silence est la plus grande perse cution: jamais les saints ne se sont tus. Silence is the greatest of all persecutions: no saint was ever silent.
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We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.
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There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.
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We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.
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Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
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On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.
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The incredulous are the more credulous. They believe the miracles of Vespasian that they may not believe those of Moses. [Fr., Incredules les plus credules. Ils croient les miracle de Vespasien, pour ne pas croire ceux de Moise.]
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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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When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.
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Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.
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One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.
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I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.
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The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
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How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
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If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.
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To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.
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The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.
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Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.
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Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.
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The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
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Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.
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For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
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Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.