Blaise Pascal Quotes
-
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
-
We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.
-
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.
-
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
-
Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?
-
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
-
The stream is always purer at its source. [Fr., Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source.]
-
That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.
-
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.]
-
Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.
-
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
-
Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.
-
Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.
-
All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.
-
The imagination disposes of everything. It creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the whole of the world.
-
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
-
The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.
-
Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
-
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
-
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.
-
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
-
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.
-
The law required what it could not give. Grace gives that which it requires.
-
All our dignity lies in our thoughts.