Blaise Pascal Quotes
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We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.
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There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.
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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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Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.
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No animal admires another animal.
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The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
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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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Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
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We never do evil so effectually as when we are led to do it by a false principle of conscience.
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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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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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Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
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The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.
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Le moi est ha|«s sable. The self is hateful.
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Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
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We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism.
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The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.
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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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When malice has reason on its side, it looks forth bravely, and displays that reason in all its luster. When austerity and self-denial have not realized true happiness, and the soul returns to the dictates of nature, the reaction is fearfully extravagant.
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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.
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Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity,. envisioned an age of "universal education and sustenance of all humanity". "The heart has reasons that reason does not understand."
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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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Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.
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I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.