Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.
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Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.
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Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.
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So we can only know God well by knowing our iniquities. Therefore those who have known God, without knowing their wretchedness, have not glorified Him, but have glorified themselves.
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Amusement that is excessive and followed only for its own sake, allures and deceives us.
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Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.
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Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
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Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.
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True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.
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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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Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.
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Jesus was in a garden, not of delight as the first Adam, in which he destroyed himself and the whole human race, but in one of agony, in which he saved himself and the whole human race.
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Look for the truth, it wants to be found.
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Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.
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Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
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The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature, we call in man wretchedness--by which we recognize that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.
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Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.
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We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
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That dog is mine said those poor children; that place in the sun is mine; such is the beginning and type of usurpation throughout the earth. [Fr., Ce chien est a moi, disaient ces pauvres enfants; c'est la ma place au soleil. Voila le commencement et l'image de l'usurpation de toute la terre.]
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A jester, a bad character.
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How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
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We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.
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There are two equally dangerous extremes-to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.
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Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.