Blaise Pascal Quotes
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It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him. Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.
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As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.
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All the trouble in the world is due to the fact that man cannot sit still in a room.
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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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Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.
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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?
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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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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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To call a king "Prince" is pleasing, because it diminishes his rank.
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All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
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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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Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.
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There are two equally dangerous extremes-to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.
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A jester, a bad character.
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How shall one who is so weak in his childhood become really strong when he grows older? We only change our fancies.
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E? loquence quipersuade par douceur, non par empire, en tyran, non en roi. Eloquence should persuade gently, not by force or like a tyrant or king.
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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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Why God has instituted Prayer:— To communicate to his creatures the dignity of causation.
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Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.
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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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The property of power is to protect.
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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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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.