Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.
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When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.
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If a man loves a woman for her beauty, does he love her? No; for the smallpox, which destroys her beauty without killing her, causes his love to cease. And if any one loves me for my judgment or my memory, does he really love me? No; for I can lose these qualities without ceasing to be.
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The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair...the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
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Must we kill to prevent there being any wicked? This is to make both parties wicked instead of one.
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Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
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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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I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
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Il n'y a que deux sortes d'hommes: les uns justes, qui se croient pe cheurs; les autres pe cheurs, qui se croient justes. There are only two types of people: the virtuous who believe themselves to be sinners and the sinners who believe themselves to be virtuous.
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When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
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We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without 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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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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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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No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
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Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to affront an almighty and eternal God?
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What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.
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The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal.
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He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright.
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The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.
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Le silence est la plus grande perse cution: jamais les saints ne se sont tus. Silence is the greatest of all persecutions: no saint was ever silent.
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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 more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.
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To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity.