Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Vanity is but the surface.
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Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.
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How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
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If god does not exist, one loses nothing by believing in him anyway, while if he does exist, one stands to lose everything by not believing.
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All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. Let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds. It will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.
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When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
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Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.
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Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
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Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything...
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The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
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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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Nothing is thoroughly approved but mediocrity. The majority has established this, and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.
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Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.
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Ugly deeds are most estimable when hidden.
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[Christianity] endeavors equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make himself known to those who should seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless so disguised them that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.
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Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.
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Kind words produce their images on men's souls.
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We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
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One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
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If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place.
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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.
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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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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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Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.