Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
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How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.
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I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.
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Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.
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Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
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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 dreamed the same thing every night, it would affect us much as the objects we see every day. And if a common workman were sure to dream every night for twelve hours that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream every night for twelve hours on end that he was a common workman.
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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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When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.
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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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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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Faith is a gift of God.
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We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.
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Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.
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[Christianity] endeavors equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make himself known to those who should seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless so disguised them that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.
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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?