Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Imagination decides everything.
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Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.
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Let each of us examine his thoughts.
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Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
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The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel.
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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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People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
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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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It's not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It's those who write the songs.
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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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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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Eloquence is the painting of thought.
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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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We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.
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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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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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If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.
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We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.
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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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The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the night of God.
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Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
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The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.
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It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
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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.