Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions.
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That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.
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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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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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The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.
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It is not shameful for a man to succumb to pain and it is shameful to succumb to pleasure.
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Ugly deeds are most estimable when hidden.
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All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.
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Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.
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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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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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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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Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
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It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.
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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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Things are always at their best in their beginning.
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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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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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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.