Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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Who confers reputation? who gives respect and veneration to persons, to books, to great men? Who but Opinion? How utterly insufficient are all the riches of the world without her approbation!
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Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.
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When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.
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Too much pleasure disagrees with us. Too many concords are annoying in music; too many benefits irritate us; we wish to have the wherewithal to overpay our debts.
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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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Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.
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Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
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Le silence e ternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
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Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
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[Unbelievers] think they have made great efforts to get at the truth when they have spent a few hours in reading some book out of Holy Scripture, and have questioned some cleric about the truths of the faith. After that, they boast that they have searched in books and among men in vain.
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To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize.
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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.
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Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.
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If we let ourselves believe that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ, then we shall find peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
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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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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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Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty, insufficient, dependent, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair.
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We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
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I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.
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For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?
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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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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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How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.