Blaise Pascal Quotes
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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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Not to be mad is another form of madness.
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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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Jesus Christ came to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves.
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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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How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!
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Without the knowledge of our wretchedness, the knowledge of God creates pride. With it, the knowledge of God creates despair. The knowledge of Christ offers a third way, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.
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The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.
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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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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.
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Either Christianity is true or it's false. If you bet that it's true, and you believe in God and submit to Him, then if it IS true, you've gained God, heaven, and everything else. If it's false, you've lost nothing, but you've had a good life marked by peace and the illusion that ultimately, everything makes sense. If you bet that Christianity is not true, and it's false, you've lost nothing. But if you bet that it's false, and it turns out to be true, you've lost everything and you get to spend eternity in hell.
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En un mot, l'homme conna|"t qu'il est mise rable: il est donc mise rable, puisqu'il l'est; mais il est bien grand, puisqu'il le conna|"t. In one word, man knows that he is miserable and therefore he is miserable because he knows it; but he is also worthy, because he knows his condition.
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Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
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That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false.
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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.
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Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.
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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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Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.
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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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The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
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Human beings do not know their place and purpose. They have fallen from their true place, and lost their true purpose. They search everywhere for their place and purpose, with great anxiety. But they cannot find them because they are surrounded by darkness.
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Why God has instituted Prayer:— To communicate to his creatures the dignity of causation.
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Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
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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.