Blaise Pascal Quotes
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Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.
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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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Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in regard to himself and in regard to others. He does not wish that he should be told the truth, he shuns saying it to others; and all these moods, so inconsistent with justice and reason, have their roots in his heart.
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Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
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Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
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The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.
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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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A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape.
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If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.
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To understand is to forgive.
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Kind words produce their images on men's souls.
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It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf.
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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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All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.
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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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Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.
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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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It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.
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True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect.... To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
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I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.
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Mutual cheating is the foundation of society.
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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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All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.
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That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.