Blaise Pascal Quotes
-
Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.
-
When we would think of God, how many things we find which turn us away from Him, and tempt us to think otherwise. All this is evil, yet it is innate.
-
The Christian's God does not merely consist of a God who is the Author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and consolation.
-
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
-
There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.
-
One has followed the other in an endless circle, for it is certain that as man's insight increases so he finds both wretchedness and greatness within himself. In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.
-
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.
-
All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.
-
Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.
-
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
-
Eloquence is the painting of thought.
-
I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.
-
We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
-
Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
-
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.
-
The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.
-
All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theater. It is a representation of the passions so natural and so delicate that it excites them and gives birth to them in our hearts, and, above all, to that of love.
-
Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.
-
The gist is that good and evil are foreordained. What is foreordained comes necessarily to be after a prior act of divine volition...Rather, everything small and large is written and comes to be in a known and expected measure.
-
L'homme n'est ni ange ni be" te, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la be" te. Man is neither angel nor beast.Unfortunately, he who wants to act the angel often acts the beast.
-
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
-
Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.
-
To doubt is a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair.
-
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.