Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go. [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.]
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Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.
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You always admire what you really don't understand.
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There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.
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Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.
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If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.
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Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
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All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
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Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.
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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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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.
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Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.
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Happiness is neither within us, nor without us. It is in the union of ourselves with God.
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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.
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I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.
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Wisdom leads us back to childhood.
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Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
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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!
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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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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.
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When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
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How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
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Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.
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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.