Blaise Pascal Quotes
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When some passion or effect is described in a natural style, we find within ourselves the truth of what we hear, without knowing it was there.
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Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.
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I should not be a Christian but for the miracles.
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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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The best defense against logic is ignorance.
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When intuition and logic agree, you are always right.
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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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There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
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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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To find recreation in amusement is not happiness.
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Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.
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All the good maxims which are in the world fail when applied to one's self.
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I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.
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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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Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
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We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.
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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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I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
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It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.
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What can be seen on earth points to neither the total absence nor the obvious presence of divinity, but to the presence of a hidden God. Everything bears this mark.
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How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.
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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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Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?
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What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.