Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
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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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You always admire what you really don't understand.
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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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We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.
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How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
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That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.
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To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.
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That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.
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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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The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
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When intuition and logic agree, you are always right.
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He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.
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Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.
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The stream is always purer at its source. [Fr., Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.]
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Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
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Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.
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Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
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Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
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Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
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Philosophers.-We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.
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Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
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The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself.
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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.