Blaise Pascal Quotes
-
One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.
-
Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is.
-
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.
-
Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.
-
Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
-
I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.
-
Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.
-
He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.
-
Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.
-
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.
-
It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.
-
Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.
-
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.
-
We implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them.
-
The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.
-
Lord, help me to do great things as though they were little, since I do them with your power; And little things as though they were great, since I do them in your name!
-
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
-
To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.
-
Quand on voit le style naturel, on est tout e tonne et ravi, car on s'attendait de voir un auteur, et on trouve un homme. When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
-
Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.
-
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
-
Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.
-
All the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms.
-
The Stoics say, "Retire within yourselves; it is there you will find your rest." And that is not true. Others say, "Go out of yourselves; seek happiness in amusement." And this is not true. Illness comes. Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.