Blaise Pascal Quotes
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To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!
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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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We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.
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Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipe below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.
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If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?
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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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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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It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
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Man governs himself more by impulse than 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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How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
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I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.
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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.
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Reason's last step is to acknowledge that there are infinitely many things beyond it.
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Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.
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Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.
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Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
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Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them. The saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.
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It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it isnecessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. In this way all sedition is prevented.
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Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
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Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
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The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
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Le moi est ha|«s sable. The self is hateful.
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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.