Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past or the future.
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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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When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should exist a common error which determines the mind of man, as, for example, the moon, to which is attributed the change of seasons, the progress of diseases, etc. For the chief malady of man is a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.
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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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Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God. Without such a counterpoise, this dignity would make him horribly vain, or this humiliation would make him terribly abject.
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It is superstitious to put one's hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.
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All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end.
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The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface.
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Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.
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Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.
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Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble.
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...for the truth is always older than all the opinions men have held regarding it; and one should be ignoring the nature of truth if we imagined that the truth began at the time it came to be known.
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Reason's last step is to acknowledge that there are infinitely many things beyond it.
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Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
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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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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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The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.
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Faith is a gift of God.
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Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.