Blaise Pascal Quotes
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What a difficult thing it is to ask someone's advice on a matter without coloring his judgment by the way in which we present our problem.
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[On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
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We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.
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Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness.
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Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.
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If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.
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If man were happy, he would be the more so, the less he was diverted, like the saints and God.
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Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
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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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Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.
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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.
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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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Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.
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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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The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.
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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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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.
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The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.
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[Christianity] endeavors equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make himself known to those who should seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless so disguised them that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.
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When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
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The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair.
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To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize.
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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.
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Faith is a gift of God.